Incoming Luis Enrique in 3… 2… 1…

BenM if you actually paid attention to what I write, rather than just projecting your cartoonish prejudices onto me, you would know that I’m (mildly) supportive of CbC. I don’t think it’s all RM makes it out to be, but afaik more information is good.

Put like this, there are some good points – clearly 1,2 and 3, and 9 and 10 are sensible, albeit it should be pointed out that the level of information required to achieve these objectives is less than I believe Mr Murphy wishes.

4 follows clearly from 1,2 and 3 – but I can’t see why this is particularly important. 5 is a different matter – it is more than just reporting activities and money, with a breakdown of wages that seems more driven by ‘social justice’ than any practical use (unless you are also going to indicate median wage, cost of living etc in each area).

As to 6, surely if the money is earned in a particular country, the tax is paid there, and if the company legally gets around that, so be it – that is a problem with the law (it is not unethical to use the law to your advantage – otherwise it is unethical to sue someone who slanders you…). If it is outside the law, fair enough – but that is covered by 7. And the problem with 7 is this strange view of ‘extractive industries’ (which industries are not extractive – my bloody employer extracts work from me…) – what you should be targetting here are companies which are simply corrupt.

Wierdly though, I think 8 is dead on – albeit from a different political perspective. Companies should be clear about how much they earn (and how this is distributed) in any area. But the problem I have is that Mr Murphy seems to believe this should be an obligation imposed by law – which means it will be subject to the same legal issues as tax laws, in that there will be get outs available. And whilst Mr Murphy seems to wish for some level of public reporting, the key problem is that this is private information – it should be given to shareholders (and if you are concerned, you can buy in to the company – campaigning groups could acquire shares easily enough and also have a voice). So whilst there are sensible points, the vision behind this smacks of centralism and totalitarian controls (state over personal privacy, for the good of all).

Of course, there is the minor problem of how you actually implement this in a government-centred way – as the tax havens would clearly not wish to do so, and as sovereign powers (at least some of them) we cannot force them to do so.

Really? This drivel *again*?

Firstly, let me just point ouit that CbC reporting was around well before Ritchie decided he invented it. Let’s also ignore the costs involved in it as well.

Let’s instead focus on the huge, gaping, glaring flaw in CbC.

If I am a manufacturer and exporter CbC near enough ends my business. Let me illustrate with a simple example.

I make widgets in country A, 800m worth of them. This is a cost, and were i not to sell them I would have lost 800m. However, I export them to country B and sell them for 1000m. I’ve turned a profit of 200m, and I repatriate the profits (a very simple form of transfer pricing) to country A and pay corp tax of 20% on it, leaving me with after tax earnings of 160m.

In Ritchie-land though, with CbC as he suggests it, the above does not happen. Instead I am forced to run two entirely seperate sets of accounts. So in country A, I have “lost” 800m through costs, but in country B I have “profits” of 1000m which I then have to pay 20% tax on – leaving me with net earnings after tax of exactly zero.

So I either have to cut my costs – probably wages – or become uncompetative with local producers and sell my widgets for money, and risk losing sales, and again, a loss. Which means in all likelihood I don’t bother risking the money in the first place and i certainly don’t think about investing in making more widgets, as world widget demand isn’t high enough to sustain factories in every market I sell to.

So basically the only way CbC works is if corporations don’t pay tax directly on profits, which entirely defeats Ritchie’s purported aims for CbC – which revolve around raising more tax revenue and stopping tax avoidance.

Indeed, we can look at a real life example. The US taxes profits of US corporations which bring profits back onshore to the USA. Which means corps don’t often do it – leaving their offshore profits offshore. Ever wonder why Apple is sitting on 100bn USF cash? You know now….and what’s more this is inefficient, because it means the money can’t be brought on shore to invest in the US, and there isn’t always the needed where it is, so it lies mostly dormant, when instead it could be invested and deployed much more productively.

Yes, the current system allows corps to move jurisdictions to minimise their tax bill, and some people clearly think this is some way cheating. But the alternative is much much worse.

It does seem like Ritchie’s whole CbC thing has been though out in reverse. He had his answer already (stopping tax avoidance), then worked back to something that would stop it (CbC), but then didn’t bother to work through what other effects CbC would have – leaving him with a totally flawed proposition.

Tyler,

is that really how it would work? Wouldn’t country A sell the widgets to B, recording revenues to cover its costs, and country B has to buy the widgets, hence recording costs to offset its revenues?

(this is one of the reasons why I don’t think CbC solves every problem, as I’ve noted previously on LC).

“, and as sovereign powers (at least some of them) we cannot force them to do so.”

Most of them are also tiny ex-colonies, and although have formal sovereignty, they still have to deal with the reality of international relations and spheres of influence. This means accommodating the strategic interests of larger powers. An example is the changes that many had to make following the 9-11 attacks to try and stop the financing of terrorism.

“I wrote yesterday about the arguments now going on in the EU about introducing country-by-country reporting for the extractive industries.

I have to say I am not objective on this issue since I created the concept of country-by-country reporting in 2003.”

That is an interesting statement. Publish What You Pay was arguing for country by country reporting for the extractive industries in 2002. Indeed, one of the members of that groups started arguing for it in 1999.

It’s there in the history pages of the About section of the Publish What You Pay website.

yes there’s a difference between advocating the introduction of country-by-country reporting, which for all I know RM may have been one of the first to do, and “creating the concept”

I’m sure the possibility of having multinationals report accounts by country had occurred to accounting standards bodies prior to 2003

Unfortunately my wife periodically demands I throw away out-of-date stuff or I could produce examples of company reports showing country-by-country reporting from the early 1970s (both for extractive industries and other industry sectors).
If this is about tax, the absence of reporting to the general public by some local subsidiaries of multi-national corporations does not affect their responsibility to file accounts for taxation purposes with the national government’s tax collectors.
So Mr Murphy, apart from claiming to have invented a practice current while he was still at school, is also claiming that publishing information *already supplied* to the tax authorities will enable the latter to collect more tax.
The Report & Accounts of many multi-national companies are already several hundred pages long and many of them group countries in a geographical are that are not “material” in order to report results by geographical segment just as they group activities that are not “material” when reporting results by activity just to produce meaningful results. I am not sure how Mr Murphy expects to get more than 100 columns on a page of BP’s or Shell’s report & accounts. Or how he expects the average shareholder to deduce anything useful from such a morass of figures.

@ luis

Yes, that is essentially how it would work, though my example is simplified. The whole point of transfer pricing is to aggregate accounts where there are inputs and outputs across many countries with many tax regimes. Companies use the same mechanism to minimise tax bills, but you can exactly stop a company relocating its head office, nor can you stop some transfer pricing without stopping all of it, as then companies can use other means (essentially financial engineering via debt issuance) to create the same structure.

Transfer pricing works, not least because it allows us to see the consolidated accounts of a company to assess it’s value – which is completely the opposite of what RM says is true.

Imagine if CbC comes in. A comopany like British Airways has costs and revenues all over the world. Apart from making it more costly for them to operate, they’d probably almost certainly have to incorporate in every country they have financial dealings in. Then to see what BA holdings was worth you’d have to consolidate all that – including all the transfers to keep some subsidiaries afloat, and other assorted financial planing. It would be much harder to see the bottom line.

As it stands, the company can, with the aid of transfer pricing accountants, bring it all back to one balance sheet.

If anything, the potential for fraud is *greater* with CbC as MNC’s would be incentivsed to commit to a more opaque and distributed financial structure to minimise their tax bills (which they will do), and given even the best accounts don’t show every trade or structure it would be much easier to hide something dodgy.

It’s a fact of life that companies and people will act to minimise their tax bills. RM himself did and continues to do so. Transfer pricing simply makes it more efficent to do so legally across borders, rather than wasting time and money on complicated and obtuse financial structures.

CbC is basically a great example of the law of unintended consequences. Bring it in to end tax “avoidance” through TP and you incentivise people to find other ways around it, or the unscupulous to commit real fraud.

As an addendum;

I know of a case currently being investigated, in the mining industry, where CbC has directly led to fraud on a tax evasion level, and indirectly as it has materially affected the share price of the two (linked) companies involved.

And before you ask, they are small regional companies, not big names who have too much to lose by defrauding people.

Luis Enrique:
“is that really how it would work? Wouldn’t country A sell the widgets to B, recording revenues to cover its costs, and country B has to buy the widgets, hence recording costs to offset its revenues?”

That’s what happens today, everywhere. Richie wants to stop it, or get to define the transfer prices himself, with some chosen pals.

John77

this isn’t my area, but I’ve talked this over with some bona fide tax experts, such as these http://www.itdweb.org and they seemed to think the extra demands on the companies wouldn’t be too onerous (as you say, they’d already have prepared accounts for the local tax authorities) but forcing them to publish it all in one place might make it a bit harder for them to perform some sleights of hand.

This is where I get my couldn’t hurt but probably won’t achieve much attitude towards CbC from.

[I suppose RM discovered country-by-country reporting like Columbus discovered America]

Tyler, you’ve lost me. Are you now saying your example @4 was nonsense? Of course CbC won’t stop transfer pricing, how could it? The idea is that making these thing easier for outsiders to see might be helpful.

pjt

oh, I was under the impression CbC just meant reporting country P&L’s after you have done with your transfer pricing.

I don’t see how it could do away with transfer pricing, or put transfer pricing decisions in the hands of a third party. Can you link to somewhere that says that is the idea?

@ Luis Enrique
The companies do have to report in each country their taxable income and their auditors have to agree that the transfer price from country A to country B is, excluding shipping costs, is reported the same in each country. So the separate parts of the dataset already exist. BUT BP, or Shell, or Exxon, or Deutsche Bank, or JP Morgan Chase, or … *cannot* fit a comprehensive country-by-country segmental analysis onto one sheet of paper to include in their report to shareholders. So they cannot, legally, provide it to Mr Murphy.
Mr Murphy doesn’t seem to care too much about what the law actually says: he is more concerned about what it *ought* to say. We lesser mortals have to live in a world where what the law actually says matters more than what Mr Murphy wants the law to say.

John,

I don’t understand … why can’t the public see what the auditors see?

“I have to say I am not objective on this issue since I created the concept of country-by-country reporting in 2003.”

Wow, you do like to big yourself up don’t you?

You’re saying that no one had thought of this before you came along in 2003. Hadn’t international accounting boards gone through this and suggested regional reporting?

How can one create (or “invent”, as I’ve often seen him say) a concept such as this?

John

further – haven’t you said multinationals did this in the seventies … so why can’t they again?

@ Luis Enrique 19
What they did in the ’70s, in accordance with UK law was to show turnover, profit etc for each country if they operated in a small number of countries or for those, like BP, which operated in dozens of countries they showed data for each geographical area; in some cases you could get UK, France, Rest of Europe or UK, Germany, Italy, Rest of Europe; sometimes Japan, Rest of Asia; basically what amounted to the most useful presentation of facts to shareholders. It was country-by-country where that made sense and by region where it didn’t. How significant to shareholders is turnover in, say, Andorra? But it wasn’t decided by size of country but whether it was any use to shareholders – I once went along to an AGM and asked about its activities in Mauritius, to which the Chairman’s initial response was “How did you know we were working in Mauritius?” – because it was mentioned in their Report and Accounts two or three years earlier – after a few seconds he gave a courteous and comprehensive unscripted response explaining the item that had caused to enquire.
The multinationals not only can but do supply segmental geographical reporting which is country-by-country if they only operate in a few countries. What they *cannot* do is produce a report with more than 100 columns on a sheet of A4 (or even A3 if it’s a fold-over sheet. Secondly how many people are going to make sense of a table with more than 100 columns? Yes, I can (more easily after typing it all into a spreadsheet), but I was able to read and write machine code when I was 17.

@17 Luis Enrique
Why cannot the public see all the information you give to your solicitor? Because some of it is confidential and would provide an advantage to competitors – it has for years been a bone of contention that UK companies are forced to reveal information useful to predatory competitors that American and European companies do not reveal. Auditors have a duty of confidentiality. Secondly, it would be like looking at all the monkeys’ typescripts, buried among which was a copy of the works of Shakespeare.
What you *should* have asked is why Mr Murphy may not see information that is not provided first or simultaneously to all shareholders. Answer – because that is “insider information”. Did you notice the well-deserved boot in Einhorn’s backside delivered by the FSA?

I didn’t mean why cant we see everything the auditors can see, I was just referring to you pointing out that the auditors get to see that firms are not telling tax authorities in different countries they used different transfer prices, i.e. they get to see transfer pricing is consistent.

I’m not to bothered about how much paper CbC would use up – just use an online appendix. Although I take your point, if you are really operating in 100s of countries, it’s a bit daft.

I’ve written before on why country by country reporting is a stupid and expensive conceit. Basically, judging by Richard’s previous work, one can have no faith that he, or any other civil society campaigner, could interpret the data accurately and distinguish tax avoidance from normal commercial activity.
Taking the example I gave in my blog post, GlaxoSmithKline has stated that it wishes to overcharge rich countries to subsidise third world markets. In country by country reporting, this would manifest itself as low profit margins in Africa and high profit margins in other countries. Ex ante, how would this appear any different to a company playing silly games with transfer pricing? It’s definitely profit-shifting, but it’s “good” profit-shifting.

@Luis Enrique 22
Using an online appendix is illegal

@ Luis Enrique
Sorry – using an online appendix would be illegal
It is also ridiculously stupid, like Richard Murphy

Publishing information online is ridiculously stupid and illegal?

@ 15 Luis

What you mention is basically what already happens with transfer pricing.

Let me expand my example a bit. Let’s say the corp sells widgets in country B, but also makes money installing the widgets. The corp can transfer the profits from widgets sales back to country A, but it can’t do the same with the widget installation profits in country B, so it pays tax on that in country B.

This is obviously a very simple example, but TP doesn’t allow a corp to move all its profits to low tax venues – which RM doesn’t seem to understand. He seems to think that it’s a mechanism purely for tax avoidance. In reality, a corp can use TP to minimise their tax bill but most of TP is entirely justifiable asset/liability matching, as per the original example. Basically enabling a corp to pay tax on net global profits rather than total sales – not an unreasonable situation.

A couple of points on corp accounts as well:

Firstly, why should corps publish full accounts for all to see? People with a shareholding should be able to see more, but why should people uninvolved with the corp be allowed to it’s affairs? A corp has some right to privacy too, much like an individuals tax affairs are also private.

Secondly, corps employ small armies of auditors and accountants to prepare their accounts. The full accounts are simply massive, and are of no real interest or value to most people. What most people want to see are the consolidated accounts and the overview of the business, so this is what is released. That’s not to say that people never look at the underlying accounts – due dilligence during M+A being a notable example, and often in legal/tax disputes. It’s just that normally it simply isn’t necessary and it is incredibly time consuming and costly. A big MNC’s full accounts make war and piece look like a pamphlet.

27 Tyler

Firstly, why should corps publish full accounts for all to see? People with a shareholding should be able to see more, but why should people uninvolved with the corp be allowed to it’s affairs?

Perhaps because companies don’t exist in vaccuums.

Companies have big impacts on stakeholders other than their own shareholders.

If that be as a large local employer, or even a large polluter in a given area.

That gives lots more people than simple shareholders an interest in a company’s financials.

You’re right that large companies have armies of accountants on hand to help them prepare their accounts.

Extracting country-by-country analyses is not that difficult once the internal systems are set up. And most have this information at hand already.

Luis Enrique @26: “Publishing information online is ridiculously stupid and illegal?”

Yes, it can be. For instance, if a medical doctor were to publish his all his accounts online, it would reveal things like “John Doe paid 100$ for syphilis treatment”. Publishing that online would be both stupid and illegal (in most countries), although it surely would enhance openness, transparency and would be useful to some people, at least those who want to attack John Doe.

Pjt

That’s about as relevant as the revelation that publishing information on paper can also be ridiculously stupid and illegal

@ Luis
If the R&A is sent to most shareholders as hard copy and a few as an online pdf, then an online appendix would supply information to some shareholders and not others. Such discrimination is illegal.
It is also, in my view, ridiculous to have an online appendix to a hard copy report – how does one access it if you are not sitting in front of a computer when you get the page to which it refers?

@ BenM

That’s why we have laws and authorities governing them.

It is not any individual’s right to poke around in a company’s dealings.

so first we argue that CbC accounts are uninteresting, now we argue they are so important that denying access to shareholders who can’t be bothered to go online is so awful as to scupper the idea.

if you think the status quo is okay, the status quo plus additional information available online ought to strictly dominate.

@ Luis Enrique
You assume that every shareholder is able to go online at will.
That is an error.
Saying something is so does not always make it so.

Luis Enrique: “That’s about as relevant as the revelation that publishing information on paper can also be ridiculously stupid and illegal”

Whether it is published on paper or on-line, the problems are principally the same. On-line information is easier to search for and therefore more dangerous from point of view of protecting privacy of individuals, etc.

I find the current arrangement in Western economies quite good: companies audit their accounts internally, make balance sheets and declare them to tax officials. Tax officials can then inspect whatever they like, can decide something is not appropriate, and then companies may challenge this in courts.

no I don’t, but I do think the set of shareholders who actually want to read the accounts but have no access to the internet is small enough not to worry about. Probably similar in size to the set of shareholders who actually want to read the accounts but who are blind, and I don’t see anybody objecting to hard copy company accounts because the blind cannot read them. If it really worries you, why not require companies to send out hard copy of CbC on request.

this line of argument strikes me as rather pathetic – we can’t have CbC because it will take up too much paper, oh we can’t do it online because some people might not have internet access. purlease.

a more profitable line of argument is that CbC accounting won’t achieve anything worthwhile. Now, I do not imagine for a minute that people will be able to read CbC accounts and reliably distinguish dodgy practices from legitimate, but I do think that information is in general useful and can make it harder for companies to tell porkies – perhaps it will stop politicians in LDCs fibbing about tax revenues – so I view it as a small gain at small cost.

I don’t hold this view with much certainty however, it wouldn’t exactly rock my world if CbC turned out to be a bad idea.

@ Luis Enrique
I am not saying we that we should not have CbC for these reasons but that we cannot. If you want to change the law, draw up a petition and get 10,000 signatures and some MP may sponsor a bill to change the law. Until then we are stuck with the law as it is.
“I do think the set of shareholders who actually want to read the accounts but have no access to the internet is small enough not to worry about.” Until the law is changed “small enough not to worry about” means Nil. Also that is misrepresenting my post “You assume that every shareholder is able to go online at will.” Having access to the internet through booking a half-hour slot in the local library isn’t good enough if the shareholder is trying to read the R&A and appendix of Shell or BP or anyone giant multinational: for that you need home or office broadband, which is far from universal.
You seem to be unaware that most individual shareholders are middle-aged or elderly: “Probably similar in size to the set of shareholders who actually want to read the accounts but who are blind” is wrong by an order of magnitude.

I agree that shareholders who don’t have Internet access are not a problem. If you want information, get access.

However, the increased reporting that Murphy wants is not practical for many reasons. It causes plenty of additional work and does not add legitimate value. The whole idea seems to be based on a weird misunderstanding of how international trade, taxes and multinational corporations work.

Tyler,

It isn’t profit remittance that Murphy is trying to stop. He’s only too happy for gross profits to be remitted to the UK from jurisdictions that have lower tax rates. What he is objecting to is companies paying tax in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates INSTEAD OF remitting gross profits back to the UK where they would attract a higher rate, or alternatively companies “transferring” earnings from high-tax to low-tax jurisdictions. The purpose of country-by-country reporting, in his mind, is to enable him (or someone like him) to take a view as to whether the profits “earned” in a lower-tax jurisdiction actually were legitimately earned there or whether they should have been booked somewhere else. As Christie says, it would be a matter of interpretation. It would be a wonderful opportunity for tax accountants and lawyers to make a LOT of money.

I take your point about cost of sales not being recorded in the country where the widgets are sold, which overstates earnings. But that would be dealt with by means of some sort of cost allocation. After all, this would be a problem in any country that imposed withholding taxes, wouldn’t it?

As I understand it, country-by-country reporting would not replace group consolidated accounts. It would be a lower level of analysis. Companies have to produce legal entity accounts, which are then consolidated. They also may produce management accounts at cost centre level, which may also be consolidated. In principle there is no reason why they could not also produce accounts by country. It’s simply another view of the same data. I just worry about the use that Murphy would like to make of these: I am not convinced that they will really tell him what he wants to know.