Why oh why are we losing business to the Irish? The simple answer is - corporation tax. Surely it does not take a financial genius like Gordon Brown (joke) to work out that if companies say they are moving from the UK to Ireland because of "concerns over the [UK] tax environment" that we must follow the Irish lead and cut our corporation tax. Corporation tax in Ireland currently stands at 12.5% - ...

The Sunday Times investigates Google’s tax arrangements in the UK. Well, actually, they have Richard Murphy read the accounts for them. In a nutshell when you buy an ad from Google you do so from Google Ireland rather than Google UK. Thus tax on any profits ends up in the Irish Treasury rather than the UK

A dispute between business and the UK government over its tax treatment of multinationals is set to deepen when WPP, the world's second-largest advertising agency, announces plans to shift its British headquarters to Ireland

My previous post ended up offputtingly lengthy (it is Saturday, after all), so here's the summary: If we want to stop holding companies relocating from the UK to Ireland, the best and simplest solution is to exempt dividends from overseas subsidiaries from corporation tax, which is what most other European countries do. The fall in corporation tax revenues would be about £1 billion per ...

The one single proposal worth celebrating was the one to bring the UK into line with just about every other European country (except Ireland) and exempt dividends from overseas subsidiaries from UK corporation tax (pdf), which has always been part of the MW manifesto, e.g. point 2 here. Seeing as the UK gives credit for overseas withholding taxes and underlying tax (in most cases), the additional ...

The Labour party has created the environment for another three British companies to leave the UK for sunnier tax climbs. Two have moved to Ireland and one to Luxembourg. Yet again the economically illiterate left whose politics of spite and envy have robbed UK business off its competitive edge. As a result they will be forced to steal more money off less people to pay for their non-jobs and other ...

Charter and Henderson to move their headquarters to Ireland in a dramatic sign of the rising pressure on the Treasury to keep its tax system competitive

As a result the UK’s total tax rate has risen from 35.8pc of commercial profits in 2006 to 37.3pc today. Among the lowest in Europe were Ireland, calculated at 26.5pc, and Denmark at 29.2pc. As we should all remember: tax rates are not the sole determinant of the tax

Below is a letter which was first published in Saturday's Guardian, it raises important questions about what motivated Ireland’s banking bailouts. Whilst it concentrates on the Irish situation, it is also relevant to similar bailouts which took place in the UK and elsewhere. Did the threat of personal loss on an enormous scale play a motivating role when a political elite, used tax paye...

From The TUC's website: Tax avoidance by wealthy UK residents through tax havens costs UK tax payers at least £4 billion a year, according to new research published today (Sunday) by the TUC. The TUC research is the first ever analysis of the role of individual tax havens in tax lost to the UK. It shows that most of the loss to tax havens is caused by Jersey, Switzerland, the Isle of Man and Guer...