Roger Godsiff – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Roger Godsiff on 2016-03-11.

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he will make an assessment of the implications for his policies on making country-by-country tax reports public of the survey results published by Christian Aid in September 2015 on the attitudes of FTSE100 companies to that issue.

Mr David Gauke

The UK supports efforts to improve tax transparency. We initiated the international work on country-by-country (CbC) reporting to tax authorities during our G8 Presidency in 2013, calling on the OECD to develop a template for this as part of the BEPS project.

The UK was also the first to commit to implementing the OECD model with legislation in Finance Act 2015. We signed the OECD agreement to share the CbC reports with other tax authorities in January 2016 and issued our final CbC reporting regulations on 26 February 2016.

The Government believes that there is scope for greater transparency by pressing the case for public CbC reporting on a multilateral basis. As the Chancellor has said, this is something that the UK will seek to promote internationally.

The European Commission is preparing an impact assessment of public CbC reporting. We look forward to seeing the outcome of this analysis, which we expect to be published early next month, and will consider any proposal put forward by the Commission in due course.