The UK has signed an agreement to crack down on tax evasion, along with 50 other countries.\u00a0 The agreement, which was made in Berlin, involves a pledge to pass on financial data freely, limiting the remaining loop holes available to tax dodgers.<\/p>\n
A recent catalogue of high-profile tax avoidance cases involving large corporations has sparked renewed support for the need for cross-border tax regulation.\u00a0 Apple, for example, has been found to be paying only 6.4% tax on international profits, with much of its UK trading tax liabilities mitigated through an Irish tax deal.<\/p>\n
The agreement, which will involve the automatic exchange of tax information between countries, has been hailed by finance ministers as a collaborative battle against tax dodgers.<\/p>\n
Wolfgang Sch\u00e4uble, German finance minister, said: \u201cWe are creating more transparency and more fairness \u2026 tax evasion will no longer be worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n
George Osborne, UK chancellor, condemned tax evasion as a \u2018scourge\u2019 preventable only through a global effort.\u00a0 He also came under pressure at the Berlin meeting to revise the UK\u2019s tax break for patent income, through the so-called \u2018patent box\u2019.<\/p>\n
He said \u201cTax evasion is not just illegal, it is immoral.\u00a0 You are robbing from your fellow citizens and should be treated like a common thief.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under the agreement, countries will collect and exchange information on bank accounts and the beneficial ownership of companies and other legal structures, such as trusts.<\/p>\n
The agreement was drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and endorsed by the G20 group of leading countries, as well as being signed by leading offshore centres and other industrialised countries.<\/p>\n
Marks Meinzer, a Tax Justice Network analyst, said: \u201cFinance ministers are right to claim historic progress with this landmark agreement for automatic tax information exchange.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UK has signed an agreement to crack down on tax evasion, along with 50 other countries.\u00a0 The agreement, which was made in Berlin, involves a pledge to pass on financial data freely, limiting the remaining loop holes available to tax dodgers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":505,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions\/505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}