I doubt that. The general anti-abuse rule came out of some proposals by Graham Aaronson, a leading tax counsel, so it is not fair to suggest that the whole industry is so wedded to egregious tax abuse that they will find any arrangement acceptable. That would make a complete mockery of the whole thing. I do not share that concern, but we have to be careful in how we draft the general anti-abuse rule. Effectively, it comes back to saying, “Although Parliament may have passed legislation in these terms, what we really meant was something slightly different.” Perhaps we did not envisage a complex scheme that works its way into what we actually said, rather than what we really meant.
If we tried to define a general anti-abuse rule too closely, we would be straight back on the horns of the dilemma of what Parliament meant when it passed a certain piece of legislation. I suspect that most people would say that we actually mean what we write in the many hundreds of pages of taxes that we pass each year. We have to allow the courts room to interpret where arrangements are clearly not what we intended when we passed them. The clue is in the word “general” in “general anti-abuse rule”. If we make it too focused, it will not work. We will see in a few years what happens.
Another measure we could use is whether the tax gap comes down. Do we see fewer of these abusive arrangements being entered into? Is that because of the threat of a general anti-abuse rule? Perhaps we could also measure it by the weight of the Finance Bill next year. If we do not need all these anti-avoidance clauses, the Bill will be an inch thinner and the Government will be happy that the general anti-abuse rule is working. I expect I will serve on the Committee next year and I am not optimistic about it being much shorter.
I cannot support new clause 12. I can see why it was drafted, and I might have drafted some amendments in Committee that were equally creative as a way to force an issue into a debate where it does not really fit. I generally agree with the idea that we should require more transparency from our largest corporate taxpayers about how much tax they are paying, but also crucially why they are paying that amount of tax.
9.15 pm
We have seen large companies being dragged over the coals about their tax arrangements, but in some cases, there are valid reasons why they do not pay much corporation tax. For example, they might not be making
a profit, or might not be making a profit for tax purposes due to losses brought forward or other reliefs that they are perfectly entitled to claim. That is why I favour requiring large companies to publish their corporation tax returns.
We have heard Companies House much maligned, but a simple change to the financial statements that have to be filed to add to corporation tax returns, and perhaps some supporting computations, would not be too hard to achieve in law. We would then all be able to see how much tax the large companies have declared that they owe, and see how they got from their reported profit down to their taxable profits. Those who are not paying any corporation tax perfectly innocently because of the return of losses or other valid reliefs would not get the sort of bad publicity that Google, Starbucks and Amazon have had. There are some rather strange entries relating to how the commercial profit is put down on the tax form, so it would be valuable if we could scrutinise these matters and see what is going on.