The Government-implemented Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) supports companies in their attempts to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic, permitting them to place employees on a temporary leave of absence known as ‘furlough’, and claim state aid to pay furloughed staff either 80% of their usual wages or up to £2,500 per month, whichever amount is […]
Trouble in Paradise – Corporate Vehicles and Contemporary Tax Avoidance
Yesterday news broke on the so-called ‘Paradise Papers’, a leak of 13.4 million files detailing the financial behaviours of individual and corporate elites, including questionable financial arrangements facilitating the avoidance of tax liabilities – Dr Nicholas Lord (The University of Manchester), Dr Karin van Wingerde (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Prof Liz Campbell (Durham University) outline […]
How IT can revolutionise the tax and benefits system
IT has fundamentally changed how we work and spend our spare time. Recent and future developments can do the same for the tax system, argues Douglas Bamford. The ideal tax system would tax economic good fortune, subsidise those with poor fortune and improve economic incentives. These aims tend to conflict with one another, but I […]
HSBC – A criminological perspective on ‘the bank of tax cheats’
Last week BBC Panorama and the Guardian newspaper, following international collaboration with various other media organisations, broke news of how Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, aided some of its wealthiest clients in evading tax. Here, Dr Nicholas Lord analyses why it is that otherwise ‘good people’, in the context of business organisations, indulge in such ‘white-collar’ […]