Corporate taxes

Corporate tax has rarely excited the imagination of the public as much as in recent years. This week Google has become the latest company to attract widespread anger over the amount of tax it has paid in the UK. The sense that there are some big, profitable companies paying relatively little in corporate tax has led many to try to allocate blame. Are multinationals simply behaving badly? Is HMRC cutting sweetheart deals with favoured companies? Have politicians failed in their task of writing the tax rules?

This presentation was given by Tom Pope at the IFS public economics lectures, held in London on 7 January 2016.

This presentation was given by Rachel Griffith as the Royal Economic Society annual lecture on 24 November 2015.

This presentation was given as a discussion of Reuven Avi-Yonah's paper 'Reinventing the wheel: What we can learn from the Tax Reform Act of 1986' at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation 9th Annual Symposium in Oxford on 23 June 2015.

Paul Johnson raises questions about manifesto pledges on tax revenues in a piece published in the Times newspaper today.

Presented at the IFS Post-Budget Briefing 2015 on 19th March, 2015.

Corporate tax has rarely received as much attention, either from policy makers or the public, as in recent years. The coalition government has enacted a series of policy changes including reductions in the main and small profits rates, changes to capital allowances, the introduction of a preferential rate for patent income (Patent Box), changes to rules concerning the taxation of foreign income, and a raft of anti-avoidance measures. The explicit, and fulfilled, aim was to increase the competitiveness of the UK corporate tax system.

Presentation given at the 'Autumn Statement 2014: IFS analysis' event on 4 December 2014.

This presentation was given at the Australian Treasury in June 2014.

The EU Commission has opined that the UK’s Patent Box policy breaches the code of conduct for business taxation. There are concerns over whether the design of the policy is open to abuse, or will provide differential treatment for economically similar companies.