In my schooldays (back in the days of black and white tele and all the shops shut on a Sunday) aggressive bigger boys in the playground would ask: “You looking for bovver, nipper?”
The correct answer was not: “Yes, can you tell me where I can get some bother”. It was to scarper.
Amazingly, in their recent report on tax, the OECD’s 12th proposed action for companies is to: “..require taxpayers to disclose their aggressive tax planning arrangements”.
The reason is clear. Companies planning aggressive tax avoidance have all the information, the tax authorities don’t; or, as the OECD delicately puts it:
“In many countries, tax administrations have little capability of developing a ’big picture‘ view of a taxpayer’s global value chain.”
Nonetheless, if the police were to require disruptive youths to share with them in advance their plans for how much bovver they were going to cause over the weekend, I’m not sure they’d get much information.
I fear it will be the same with this approach to what is a very important tax question.
Note: This blog addresses issues raised by OECD’s proposed Action 12. Action 12 is scheduled to be completed by September 2015. For more on Corporate Citizenship’s views on tax see our paper Tax as a Corporate Responsibility Issue