A CHRISTMAS STORY

BLOG 185

A CHRISTMAS STORY

Do you think we have a fair tax system?  Government Ministers and HMRC officials keep telling us we do, but I’m not so sure myself.  As it’s near Christmas, I thought I’d tell you a story.

Are you sitting comfortably?  Then let us begin.  Once upon a time in a far away country called Ghana a kind teacher called Freda decided to set up a nursery school.  It was very successful and in 2008 she decided to expand the nursery school.  She mentioned this to her daughter (who lived in England) when the daughter came on a visit to Ghana.  Returning home to England the daughter told her husband Edwin, who had also come from Ghana.  Edwin had bigger ideas.  He volunteered to help Freda create a private school to take pupils right up to Junior school level.  He saw the project as his chance to give something back to the country of his birth.  Edwin entered into a partnership with three other people to create the school.  He put in £21,000 of capital and collected money from others to support the school.  By September 2009, it was clear that the school needed much more money than had been raised but Freda and other family members had become unhappy with Edwin’s “hands on approach” to the school and were losing interest.  When it opened, it attracted only nine pupils, had difficulty hiring teachers and quickly collapsed.  Edwin and everyone else lost their investments.

Some of you are probably thinking that Christmas stories ought to have happy endings.  Others may think what’s that got to do with fairness and tax?  So I’ll tell you Edwin’s story too.  Edwin had a job in IT.  Indeed, he had two jobs.  When he started the school project, he was employed by a large IT company, TPI Eurosourcing.  However, he had previously worked for a smaller one, Mphasis, and continued to do a bit of freelance consultancy work for Mphasis because he hoped that as they grew, they would want him to work for them again.  Edwin wanted to keep his Mphasis fees separate from his TPI salary so decided to open a second bank account.  Sadly, he had a poor credit rating but his brother agreed to open an account at Barclays in his own name and let Edwin run the account.  Edwin did not look at that account very often as he did not do a lot of consultancy work, but when he started to collect money for the school, he put it through the Barclays account.  Edwin’s self-employed earnings for 2009/10 were fairly low.  This prompted HMRC to open an enquiry into his tax affairs.  That’s obviously fair.  If someone is self-employed and he cannot live on the income he declares, he is obviously understating his tax.  It would clearly not be reasonable for HMRC to look at the rest of his return and see that he had a full-time job elsewhere so his consultancy income was unlikely to be significant. (Sorry, as its almost Christmas I must try harder not to be so sarcastic).

Well HMRC looked at the Barclays Bank account.  They discovered 7 round sum bankings of cash totalling £6,740, 5 items that Barclays described as “Ezeoke OM Purchase” totalling £8,670 plus two marked “OM Ezeoke Bill” totalling £2,120, one marked “CN Martins Barclays” of £2,120 also and 2 items marked “S Rojer Mark”, totalling £1,250, a total of £20,900.

“Ah ha”, thought Mrs Scrooge, the HMRC Officer (not her real name). “If I add £20,900 to the declared income, the total comes to a much more reasonable figure for someone to live on”.  So Mrs Scrooge invited Edwin and his accountant to a meeting to explain why they thought the £20,900 should not bear tax.  Edwin produced a letter from his father in Ghana saying he had lent Edwin £14,169.  He produced a letter from Mr Eze Oke in Nigeria saying that he had lent Edwin £14,160 towards a school in Ghana.  He produced a letter from Freda saying that she had received 117,000 Ghana Cedis from Edwin towards the building of the school.  He produced a letter from a firm of solicitors in Ghana saying that they had been instructed to draw up the partnership agreement for the school.  Unfortunately the figures in the letters did not reconcile with the amounts in the bank account though.

“Not sufficient”, said Mrs Scrooge.  “Where are the loan agreements”.  Sadly there were none.  Perhaps in Ghana people trust their friends and relatives whereas in England of course no one would dream of lending money to their son without instructing a solicitor to draw up a loan agreement first.  (That doesn’t sound right.  I’m English and over the years I’ve lent money to lots of people, never thought of asking for a loan agreement and have always been repaid.  So perhaps HMRC families operate differently, as had I been Mrs Scrooge, I certainly would not have expected there to be loan agreements).

In any event, Mrs Scrooge then, I assume, explained how the fair English tax system works.

1.      She decides that £20,900 paid into a bank account set up to bank freelance earnings is likely to be income in the absence of any proof to satisfy her otherwise.

2.      It is then for Edwin to prove it is not income.

3.      HMRC use a principle called the “assumption of continuity”.  This enables Mrs Scrooge to assume that if Edwin had undisclosed earnings of £20,900 in 2009/10, he would have similar undisclosed earnings in 2008/09, 2010/11 and 2011/12, a total of £83,600 undisclosed income.

4.      Edwin has deliberately omitted the £20,900 from his tax return as he did not regard it as income.  Deliberately omitting income is very serious.  Accordingly in addition to the tax on the £83,600, Mrs Scrooge wanted a penalty equal to 54.25% of that tax.

Assuming income tax at 40%, that meant that Mrs Scrooge wanted Edwin to pay £51,582, because he had not proved to her that the £20,900 was not income.  Does that sound fair to you?

Edwin appealed to the tax Tribunal.  HMRC told the Tribunal that the law says that if there remains any uncertainty in the judge’s mind, then Edwin will not have discharged the burden of proof, so must find against Edwin and give HMRC their £51,582 of flesh.  “Wrong”, said the wise judge.  “Edwin has only to show that it is more likely than not that the £20,900 was to build the school”.  “He struck us as a straightforward and reliable witness”, they said.  “We take account of the discrepancies in the figures.  But we also take into account that the type of IT work he does is not compatible with offering services to individuals on an ad hoc basis.  We also do not think that the fact that someone opens a separate bank account for his consultancy income creates a presumption that everything in that account is income.  We think that Edwin has demonstrated to our satisfaction on the balance of probabilities that the £20,900 was not undeclared taxable earnings”.

So there’s the Christmassy happy ending.  They all lived happily ever after (probably) – well, possibly except for Mrs Scrooge who might have got a bonus for creating £51,852 for HMRC out of £20,900 of non-taxable receipts, but I suspect she feels there are plenty of other taxpayers to be fleeced so what’s one defeat.  If so, she is probably right.  Many people are scared of going to the Tax Tribunals, so I suspect most people in Edwin’s position pay up. 

Oh, and while the assumption of continuity is a concept that has been endorsed by the Appeal Tribunals, it is one that applies only where the omissions are of a type that is likely to recur, which was not the case with Edwin’s receipts (even if they had been income).

So congratulations to Edwin (for the technically minded, he is Edwin Bekoe (Case TC 6181)) and to his accountant for this well-deserved victory.  And a happy Christmas to all my readers.

ROBERT MAAS

TAXING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

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TAXING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

One of the documents the government published on Budget day was a Treasury Position Paper on “Corporate tax and the digital economy”.  I have just finished reading it.  To be honest, I did not find it at all convincing or, indeed, very logical.  However I think it important because it sets out the Treasury’s justification for the Chancellor’s new withholding tax on royalty payments and its thinking on taxation in the digital world.

It starts with a statement of principles.  “The important question when applying corporation tax to a multinational group is what amount of profits should be taxed in the UK compared with the other countries in which the group operates.  The answer to that question is currently determined by an international tax framework which was developed in the early 20^th century …  The overall principle underlying that framework is to tax a multinational group’s profits in the countries in which it undertakes its value-generating activities.  That is a principle that the government continues to support.  It does not, for example, believe that another country should have a general right to tax profits that a UK business generates from a product that is designed in the UK, manufactured in the UK, marketed in the UK and then sold remotely to that country’s customers …  Instead countries should have the right to tax business profits derived from productive activities, enterprise and human innovation in their jurisdiction, irrespective of where shareholders and customers are located”.

So far, so uncontroversial – or, at least, nearly so!  The international tax framework actually is that a country can tax the profits generated worldwide by its own companies (but in doing so should give credit for tax paid on those profits elsewhere) and can also tax profits made in its country by foreign entities that have some form of business organisation in its country (such as a branch).  Even then it should only tax the profits derived from that branch.  In determining what profits are derived from a branch, the host country will take account of productive activities, enterprise and human innovation of that branch.  So, nearly right, but that is not what worries me.

The Treasury goes on to assert that “while the government continues to support the principle of aligning profits with value creation, there is a clear need to consider the situations in which that principle is not being delivered by the existing international tax framework.  In particular, it is important to consider how the international tax framework is being stressed by digitalisation and whether it is flexible enough to take account of the differences in how certain digital business models operate and generate value”.

“Why”, you may ask.  It is certainly not clear to me how the international tax framework is being stressed.  Take, for example, Amazon.  As far as I am aware, Amazon does not have a branch in the UK.  It has warehouses here but the international tax rules exclude warehouse from being a branch – sensibly, because a warehouse does not create value or by itself generate profits.  It simply fulfils international contracts created in another country.  How does digitalisation make Amazon any different from, say, Marks & Spencer?  I do not know if Marks & Spencer has warehouses in the USA, but if it does, I suspect that the Treasury would be pretty upset if the USA were to want to seek to attribute a US profit-earning element to sales made by Marks & Spencer in the USA.

Indeed, the Treasury emphasises that “the mere consumption of a good or service in a country should not, by itself, entitle that country to tax the profits of the business providing that good or service”.  But the bottom line is that, while conceptually it believes that the US, not the UK, should have the right to tax profits on sales made in the UK by Amazon and Google and Facebook and other large US corporations, it recognises “the growing public dissatisfaction that the corporation tax payments of digital businesses are not commensurate with the value that they derive from the UK markets”.

I am a bit puzzled by this.  I have never heard anyone say that they believe Google or Facebook or whatever “derive value” from the UK market.  I read quite a lot but have never read an article suggesting that such companies “derive value” from the UK market.  There is certainly an irrational public dissatisfaction that they appear to pay very little tax anywhere.  Irrational, because under the international tax framework they ought to pay their tax in the USA, so the US public have the right to be dissatisfied but it should be no business of the British public how the USA wishes to tax American corporations.  Indeed, the creation of the USA derives from the fact that its citizenry in 1776 felt strongly that the UK had no right to charge its corporations to UK tax unless it integrated the US colonies more firmly into the UK.

The US policy is based on the premise that the US wishes US corporations to reinvest overseas profits overseas in order to expand US influence throughout the world.  Accordingly it does not seek to tax such profits until they are brought into the USA.  That is not an unreasonable system; indeed it is the system that the UK itself decided to adopt a few years ago (with an exception, like the USA, for passive income such as interest and dividends).  Different countries adopt different tax policies.  It is no more unreasonable for the USA to decide not to tax profits of US groups which are retained overseas than for the UK to have adopted “one of the most competitive tax systems in the world” by imposing corporation tax at 19% in the hope that, say, a US company wishing to establish a branch in Europe would prefer to pay UK tax at 19% in preference to basing its branch in France and paying French tax at 33.3% instead.  No one would suggest that a US company that is enticed to establish its branch in the UK should have to pay extra taxes on sales in France because it is “avoiding” French taxes by having its branch in the UK.  Yet that is the logic of the UK public’s – and I suspect the UK Treasury’s – gripe that the USA chooses not to tax Google or Facebook.

The Treasury has however come up with an ingenious argument to justify its desire to tax Google and Facebook.  It says that in reality you and I work for Google and Facebook, so it is our activities in the UK that enable Google to make money from UK sales, so the UK should tax that money.

So how do we work for Google?  I’ll give you an example.  I follow baseball.  I am a fan of the Chicago Cubs.  For a modest annual subscription I can watch all of the Cub’s games live on my computer by signing in to the website of MLB (Major League Baseball) who run baseball in the US.  I access the Chicago Cubs website via Bing (which is part of Microsoft) because Lenovo (a Chinese company) installed it on my computer before I bought it.  (I do not actually use Bing to go to the MLB website because Microsoft Edge refuses to let me watch baseball, so I use Firefox to do this and Firefox uses Yahoo.  However they are all US companies so it does not affect the principle).  When I access the Cub’s website, it includes a number of adverts, some from US companies and some from UK ones.  Why should Fortnum & Mason (on the website today) advertise on the Cub’s website?  I doubt they can sell much in Chicago.  The answer is that they don’t.  They advertise on the version of the website that Microsoft puts in front of me.  They advertise to me because I bought something on line from them a couple of months ago.  Microsoft has incorporated software in Bing that records what websites I browse.  This software was probably devised in Seattle and I imagine is operated by Bing from Seattle.

You probably know that already.  So how do I work for Microsoft?  The UK Treasury’s argument is that Microsoft’s software enables them to tell Fortnum & Mason that I view the Chicago Cubs website every day during the baseball season and for a fee that they will put Fortnum’s advert in front of me every time I do so.  Of course Fortnum’s are not interested in me.  But if Microsoft tells them that 100,000 UK people go on baseball websites every day during the baseball season and they will put Fortnum’s advert in front of them all, Fortnum’s may decide to advertise these.  So, say the Treasury, every click I make on my browser earns Microsoft the ability to generate advertising revenue.  Because it is my work clicking that does this, the UK ought to be able to tax the profit Microsoft makes from Fortnum’s through putting Fortnum’s advert in front of me (using their US developed software monitored from the USA).

Personally I find this wholly unconvincing.  It is a bit like saying that Sainsbury’s know what I like to buy because they track this through my Nectar card.  Accordingly if Sainsbury’s were to open a shop in Chicago, the UK would be entitled to tax part of the profits that they would make when I shop in Chicago because they have the ability to target special offers at me when I shop in Chicago in the same way as they do when I shop in the UK.

The other obvious fallacy is that when I visit Chicago (as I do every year) I access the Cubs’ website as much as I do here.  Why should the UK be entitled to tax Microsoft based on clicks that I make in Chicago?  I very much doubt that Microsoft differentiates my Chicago clicks from my London ones when both are made on my i-Pad.  I also doubt that either Microsoft or Fortnum’s care where I click, so my clicking cannot provide a rational basis of taxation.

The Treasury also have another odd concept.  Again starting “from the position that profits are taxed in the countries in which a business has genuine economic activities” it concludes that “to maintain confidence in the international tax framework and avoid competitive distortion in local markets, it is crucial that multinational groups are prevented from being able to realise profits in low-tax entities that are not justified by local economic substance.  That is partly about ensuring a robust international transfer pricing framework and pursuing multinational reforms to address the limitations of that framework in aligning taxable profits with value created”.  Let’s examine that conclusion.  Let’s take Starbucks.  Starbucks does not make much profit in the UK.  The head of Costa complained a few years ago that Starbucks overpays for its sites, which probably explains why it makes little profit here.  What is profit?  It is the difference between sales and costs.  What are Starbucks main costs?  The purchase of coffee, rent and rates, staff costs, and a payment to use the Starbucks brand and marketing concepts that were created in Seattle.  Any reasonable definition of profits requires the deduction of all of those costs.  Starbucks purchases its coffee from an overseas related company.  HMRC need to be vigilant to ensure that it does not overpay for that coffee.  HMRC also needs to be vigilant to ensure that the price Starbucks in the UK pays to access the Starbucks intellectual property created in Seattle is not excessive.  Its transfer pricing specialists are adept at meeting both of those challenges.  If Starbucks UK makes a payment to Starbucks US and HMRC are satisfied that the payment is at the right level, are the UK entitled to nevertheless tax those payments to the US because, say, the payment is based on the number of coffees you and I buy in the UK?  Most people, including the Treasury, would say, “Of course not”. So, why should the UK suddenly be entitled to tax that profit simply because Starbucks USA decides to sell its intellectual property to Starbucks BVI or whoever?  Provided that the UK company is paying the right price, it is surely irrelevant to UK tax who that price is paid to.  How can what Seattle chooses to do internally damage confidence in the international tax system?  It surely can’t!

Of course it is not easy for HMRC to check whether the price paid for use of the intellectual property is a market price.  But it is no more difficult to do so if that price is paid to Starbucks BVI than if it is paid to Starbucks USA.  It may be that the Treasury questions the competence of HMRC.  But, if so, it is HMRC’s paymaster.  If the management of Marks & Spencer was felt by its shareholders to be incompetent, they wouldn’t say, “We must find a different way to sell our socks and undies that by-passes the Marks & Spencer stores”.  They would tell the Board to replace the CEO with someone with greater competence to sort out the problem.

I am a bit surprised that the Treasury do not equate my purchases of coffee from Starbucks with my clicks on Bing.  They look very similar to me.  I can only conclude that the Treasury feels that my coffee purchases are a ridiculous basis for a system of international taxation.  If so, great, but surely my clicks form an equally ridiculous one?

ROBERT MAAS

THE 2,000 Euro BTW Scam?

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THE 2,000 Euro BTW Scam?

I tend to watch Panorama each week.  Sometimes they have interesting programmes but I am not sure why I continue to watch their tax output because it is invariably misleading and always strongly biased towards the view that everyone (other than BBC journalists, I assume) is a crook and that privacy (again, other than for BBC journalists, I assume) is such a wicked concept that anyone who wishes to keep their private affairs private must be doing so to avoid tax.  The producers and journalists also seem to believe that everything that happens in the UK ought to be taxed here and the UK’s international treaties that cede to other countries the right to tax their own citizens and corporate vehicles on some receipts from the UK make the UK complicit in tax avoidance.

I think it a shame if the government fix the licence fee at a level which means that the BBC cannot afford to take tax advice in order to ensure that programmes that they make about tax actually reflect the tax system.  I suspect however that it is not budget constraints but a culture within the BBC that integrity is an out-model concept and if a journalist wishes to mislead viewers in order to propagate a personal biased view, that is OK with them – and presumably with the BBC Trust too.

Which brings me to “The Billion Pound VAT Scam” as it was titled.  It is not about a billion pound VAT scam at all.  It is about a few thousand euro BTW scam (the Netherlands equivalent of VAT).

If you didn’t watch the programme, the facts are simple.

a)      The journalist went to China to try to find a smuggler prepared to smuggle Chinese goods into the UK.

b)      He didn’t find one, but did find someone willing to smuggle the goods into the Netherlands.

c)      He purchased a small quantity of goods in China and had them smuggled into the Netherlands.

d)      The goods were then transported from the Netherlands to an Amazon warehouse in the UK.  The journalist (or his editor) did not think it worth mentioning that the EU fundamental concept of freedom of movement of goods means that goods can freely be moved from the Netherlands to the UK without any VAT becoming due anywhere – but that fact would have completely undermined the message that the BBC wished to convey, so it is fortunate that in a half-hour programme, there was not time to mention that.

e)      The journalist registered a UK business with Amazon and sold some of the goods on Amazon.

f)       Amazon did not ask the business for its VAT number.  There is of course no obvious reason why they should do so.  There is no obligation to provide one’s VAT number on a sale to a non-business person and most sales on Amazon are such sales.  In the Budget, the Chancellor proposed to require Amazon to obtain VAT numbers from everyone who uses their platform, so that perceived shortcoming should not be a problem after that has been legislated.  Whether that is “a good thing” is a matter of opinion.  It obviously seriously damages the chances of small UK businesses whose turnover is below the VAT threshold being able to grow.  But the Chancellor clearly believes (not simply in this regard) that killing off small businesses is a reasonable price to pay to raise a bit of extra tax.

g)      The journalist then created another account with Amazon in the name of a Chinese company and it sold something on Amazon for £5 without charging VAT.

h)      Amazon then blocked the Chinese company from selling anything further for 30 days while it investigated it.

i)        The journalist spoke to the new Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Labour MP Meg Hillier, who was predictably outraged at this so-called VAT avoidance – presumably because she does not know enough about VAT to know that the VAT “avoided” was 0.83p (the VAT on £5) as the supplies by the UK company were well under the VAT registration threshold but there is a nil threshold where a non-established trader sells goods in the UK.  Of course she probably should have been outraged that the UK’s membership of the EU prevents HMRC from taxing movements of goods from EU countries which may exercise laxer control over imports than HMRC does, but she did not express such outrage.

j)        The journalist then spoke to a somewhat bemused HMRC official, Jim Harra, who has a very deep understanding of VAT, told him that he had evaded VAT of a bit over £500 and handed him a cheque.  Jim jovially said for the camera that perhaps he should speak to the journalist off camera.  I hope he did and explained that he had not evaded anything and owed HMRC less than a quid, but thanks for the cheque because HMRC always welcomes people wanting to volunteer money to reduce the national debt.

Of course if the journalist had gone to his editor and said he wanted to do a programme about how to avoid 0.83p VAT and please could the BBC send him to China as part of it, the programme probably would never have got made.  If he had said he wanted to do a programme about how efficient the UK Border Agency is compared with their Netherlands counterparts, that programme probably would not have been made either.

But as it is only licence payers’ money being wasted on misleading propaganda, who cares?

ROBERT MAAS