Tax Havens

Terribly funny

Then you have the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – KPMG, Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte – whose expertise is indispensable for anyone hoping to diminish their tax exposure. Writing in an Irish magazine, a KPMG partner spelled out the mindset:

A worrying tendency seems to have emerged among external stakeholders to make ‘moral’ judgements about tax planning and to expect companies to manage their tax affairs in a ‘moral’ way . . . Let’s be clear about this. Tax is a cost to business. As with any other cost, the board members owe their shareholders a duty to manage that cost by the legal means afforded to them.

KPMG gave us a sense of its attitude to legality when it paid a fine of $456m in the US for ‘designing, marketing and implementing illegal tax shelters’. The big four have now set up a body to regulate themselves called the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Not only do the accountancy firms appoint representatives to the IASB’s committees, they actually fund it themselves – through a foundation registered in a tax haven.