Multinational taxes: what do politicians know?

This election has ratcheted up the calls for Starbucks and other multinationals to pay more taxes on their British revenues.  Politicians give no indication of how they will achieve that; one suspects their silence is based on ignorance. This blog is a brief explanation of why multinationals are fully entitled, under present laws, to push profits into lower tax regimes.  If the UK wants to change, it may need multinational legislation.

If a brand owner in one country sells to a distributor in another, they split the total profit between them.  If the companies are independent, the presumption is that the split is “arm’s length” and that is accepted by the tax authorities in both countries.  The game gets tricky when both companies are owned by the same group and the brand ownership is switched from one country to another.

The practice began with Bailey’s Irish Cream which was launched in 1972 to accept the Irish Finance Minister’s offer that any export profits for a new Irish agriculture-based brand would be free of tax for 10 years.  The brand became a huge global success and, come 1982, the ultimate brand owner, Grand Metropolitan, was about to be hit by a sharp jump in taxes.

By coincidence, the concept of “brand equity” as a marketing asset which could go on a balance sheet was also being developed in the 1980s.  Why not move the brand equity from Dublin to the Netherlands which was, then anyway, offering low taxes on Dutch earnings by foreign-owned assets? Why not indeed?

As you can imagine, the British and Irish tax authorities were less that thrilled with that and Grand Metropolitan had to justify that the Netherlands company really was marketing the brand globally.  In effect, the distributor company is renting the use of the brand equity asset from the brand owner and has to pay for that.  If the transfer price is “arm’s length” it is all perfectly legitimate so, for two companies both parts of the same group, what exactly is “arm’s length”?

The multinational can count on the support of the tax authorities in the brand owning country.  Their take decreases by the amount of profits switched to the distributor (or franchisee) country.  And if the brand owning company can show it sells, on the same terms, to (or franchises) companies which are not part of the same group, the case for “arm’s length” is strengthened.

HMRC has spent a huge amount of time and money on this issue.  Whilst it is possible they have not been tough enough, it is much more likely that the law is not on their side.  It is also likely that any unilateral action by the British government would lead to even more expensive legal costs on appeal.

With corporation tax down to 20% the UK is closing the low tax gap, but unless politicians can show they understand the game, and come up with a credible big stick, HMRC is going to have to settle for goodwill payments by the multinationals.

In praise of Standard Chartered and their advice on African tax avoidance

The perenially enraged over at Action Aid are today enraged about the way in which Standard Chartered bank gave advice on how to avoid (legally, of course) certain corporate taxes upon investments in poorer African countries. We, in contrast, would like to congratulate Standard Chartered on their public spiritedness in advising people on how to avoid certain corporate taxes in poorer African countries. And we do so on the basis of a point made by Joe Stiglitz. The outrage is here:

One of Africa’s most high-profile banks – Standard Chartered – publicised the advice of a Mauritius-based financial company on how to avoid tax in some of the poorest countries in the world, a new ActionAid report states.

The FTSE-100 bank which operates in 15 African countries published the advice in its Standard Chartered Insights 2013/2014. The publication is aimed at company treasury departments.

The tax avoidance advice – which is entirely legal – can be used to avoid potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in tax in some of the poorest countries in Africa. It suggests structuring investments through Mauritius in order to avoid capital gains tax and withholding tax.

You can hear the frothing at the mouth as they shout in rage at this, can't you? However, this outrage is entirely misplaced, presumably as a result of their ignorance of how corporate taxation works.

The most essential thing to grasp about it is that the company itself is never bearing the economic burden of such a tax. It is always some combination of shareholders and workers. In an entirely autarkic economy it will be the shareholders, capital if you like, which will carry 100% of that burden. In a more open economy the workers pick up some of that burden. For taxing capital in an economy where capital can leave, capital decide not to enter, means that there will be less capital in that economy. Capital plus labour is what raises productivity and thus wages, meaning that less capital means lower wages. As the economy becomes ever more open, and smaller relative to the size of the global economy, then the burden on the workers increases.

It never quite reaches zero on capital as Adam Smith pointed out in his one Wealth of Nations use of "invisible hand". Even if people can invest abroad without penalty some will still prefer to invest at home and thus led, as if by that invisible hand, benefit their fellows. For us, here, this means that the impact of corporate taxation on capital will never be zero.

Which brings us to Joe Stiglitz's point. Which is that the burden of a tax can be over 100%. What people lose from the tax being levied can be greater than the amount raised from that tax. That's one of the failures of the Robin Hood Tax of course.

But now to the case at hand. As an economy becomes smaller relative to the global economy the workers carry more of the tax burden. Poor African countries have economies the size of a modest English town: they're small therefore. And given that we are talking about foreign investment here they are entirely open to the global economy. So, the burden of any capital taxation is largely going to fall upon the workers in those poor African economies. And that burden can be (and we would estimate will be) higher than the tax collected.

Meaning that, if you've advised people to dodge that corporate taxation and the investment thus goes ahead, that you've just raised the wages of some of the poorest people in the world. For note that the effect isn't upon just those workers in the investments made. It's upon all of the workers in the economy where the investment is made.

Advising people to invest in sub-Saharan Africa through Mauritius thus raises wages in sub-Saharan Africa by whatever effect on investment happens now it's free of those corporate taxes. All of which strikes us as a bloody good idea.

So why is Action Aid so spittle flecked at the very thought of it? We assume it's just because they're ignorant of how corporate taxation works. Which leaves us with only one last question. Why do they expend so much effort telling us how the tax system should work when they've no clue about how it does?

Gabriel Zucman's latest very interesting paper

There's much huffing and puffing about the information in that above chart. The capitalist bastards are taking an ever growing share of the economy and something must be done! And then along comes Gabriel Zucman (he's the third of the Parisian economic trio, along with Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty) to try and tell us that this really is a problem and something must be done! Except the evidence that he shows us tells us that it's not the problem that it is usually identified as. Here's his latest paper:

Measuring the costs of tax havens to foreign governments is fraught with difficulties. However, balance of payments data and corporate filings show that US companies are shifting profits to Bermuda, Luxembourg, and similar countries on a large and growing scale. About 20 percent of all US corporate profits are now booked in such havens, a tenfold increase since the 1980s. This profit-shifting is typically done within the letter of the law and thus would be best described as tax avoidance rather than fraud.

There's certainly profit shifting going on but it's not profits being shifted out of the US and into those tax havens, not to any great degree at least. The IRS isn't dumb enough to allow that at any great scale. What is happening is that US based corporations are making larger profits from their foreign activities and then parking them in those tax havens.

Yes, really: the way that US profits as a share of GDP is calculated is that all profits made by US domiciled firms are counted as part of US GDP. So, Glaxo's profits in the US (and the associated underlying economic activity that generates them) are part of US GDP. Apple's profits in the US, and the associated underlying economic activity in the US, are part of US GDP. But, crucially, Apple's profits in Europe, but not the underlying associated economic activity in Europe that generates them, are also part of US GDP. So, if Apple's European profits rise then US GDP rises by the amount of those profits and the capital share, or the associated profit share, of US GDP also rises by the same amount. But, of course, that means that the profit share of US GDP rises: but that's purely an effect of the way that we calculate the numbers. Nothing has flowed from labour to capital in the US economy. The workers aren't getting any less of the portion of their labours.

Simply, foreign profits of US corporations have risen. This means absolutely nothing at all to the US domestic economy in the sense that while, because of the way we measure it, the capital (or profit) shares are rising, there's simply no effect at all on the division of spoils inside the American economy.

Zucman is also showing that this is a significant effect. At least two whole percentage points of GDP.

Of course, Zucman is also telling us that this is terrible and that something must be done! On examination however it seems to be largely of no import at all. So, Apple is increasing its European profits. This is bad because?

Yes, of course we're being lied to, why do you ask?

We're all wearily familiar with the ritual incantations that it's those nasty multinationals that dodge taxes in developing countries and that therefore little babies die. This is not, despite the frequency of those incantations, actually true. The extremely impressive researcher, Maya Forstater, has rather more of the truth for us here:

Nevertheless if current estimates are best we have to go on, they should at least be communicated clearly. One thing that becomes clear once you take away all the showmanship of the killer facts is that the estimates commonly used are simply not that much money. Global numbers in billions are hard to comprehend, but we can make honest and clear efforts to make sense of them on a country-by-country basis. According to the data that ONE sent me (which uses PWC data on national tax rates to estimate the tax revenue losses associated with GFI illicit flows estimates) it looks like most countries where aid contributes a significant proportion of government budgets have estimated trade related tax losses in the region of 15% or less of aid receipts. Not nothing, but not the grand problem-solving amounts we are led to believe.

If you look at what this amounts to on a per capita basis (based on the ONE data and my calculations), Bangladesh could raise $2.77 extra tax for each of its citizens, Ethiopia $6.81, India $9.31and China $4.14. That is dollars; single dollars. Per person. Per year.

We thoroughly recommend reading her whole piece in full. Maya's forte is to take these various reports from the various usual suspects and then drill down into the actual numbers and assumptions that they are making and test the veracity of them. An earlier success of hers was pointing out that estimates that Zambia had been diddled out of $10 billion in copper revenues was based on the pricing structure of 2 tonnes (yes, just two tonnes) of samples that had been sent out. Thus over-estimating the correct copper revenues by a factor of five (the very boring technical detail which I was able to help with subsequent to that article is that samples cost more than production lots. Largely because customs data on pricing (which is where the prices came from) includes the cost of transport in said customs pricing. So if you send someone 20 kg of copper as a sample through DHL the customs price for that 20 kg includes the DHL package costs. Which is, as we all know, rather higher per kg than the transport costs of 10,000 tonnes of copper on a ship).

It's important for us to recognise all of this: and Forstater's major point here is that these numbers we're being fed about the impact of tax losses on developing countries simply are not true.