Wednesday, November 13, 2013

The happiness to your safety underwater by scuba diving suits

Generally there are numerous many people who had supported scuba diving suits all-around the entire world . It is rather exciting hobby which can be loved through athletes all age ranges . The thought of waging through the sea is actually motivating for most people , means they are interested to have that it when they obtain a good opportunity . Scuba diving study course provides a good possibility to see a type of marine fauna , including professional people to manta light . It's really a exciting encounter to see their uncommon animals which perform in seas , something which will certainly make you spellbound . Scuba diving suits tend to be acquiring ever more popular because of its bangle , bringing in individuals to discover their secrets of undersea globe .

Satisfaction concerning scuba diving fits huge , however you need to use security once gonad plunge in liquid . scuba diving suits essentially need dependable individual scuba diving gear concerning good quality . Individual scuba diving products are necessary to make sure your security under water . Oral assistance scuba divers swimming as well as inhale under water , and other associated elements although maintaining their level concerning under water animals from increasing .


The final however the essential gear for the scuba diving suits tend to be personal included under water respiration device . Here is a fundamental need for scuba divers , since the availability of necessary air while they're within the water .

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Their Potential Benefits To Design Software Package

Regarding creating a room or redesigning an existing one, their wise to consider enough time to attract from measurements, spot devices, furnishings as well as fixtures and make certain there is the area, just the right appearance and appropriate design. The true reason for this might be that it'll help save you each money and time subsequently whenever you visited make the alterations.

It once was you - or perhaps the inside developer - needed to make use of page concerning chart report to attract their size of the area, are the areas concerning windows and doors as well as that means that they started, subsequently vignette the place concerning items which might enter in the area. This particular, naturally, resulted in decade or even countless redraws, a big waste as well as report!

Their wise inside developer might bring the program of area then usage reduce outs concerning what to measure to put on the strategy, therefore preserving their redrawing work, however this particular invested some time.

Fortunately, aided by the fast growth of computer systems as well as program, all of this is complete out using. It's still vital that you take time to strategy an area layout to make sure you avoid wasting cash in the future, however that point is significantly reduce aided by the production as well as development concerning design program.

Utilizing advanced 3d room design software it is currently potential in order to organize the area in most their measurements, such as top, spot doors and windows additional really then start putting furnishings, fittings as well as fixtures. You can make use of it to select color strategies through changing the color of wall surfaces, roof, carpeting, perhaps the furnishings you intend to set up that it.

Then you're able to make use of the program to see their design as well as layout off whatever position, such as just like you had been within the room by itself. It has the additional advantage of letting you see just what an area might seem like while you submit by way of a home, browse the windowpane or take a seat on the seat or perhaps couch! Effective material!

These will be the energy concerning design program it is used being a offering device through kitchen area developers as well as installers, restroom developers as well as installers, and inside developers by themselves. Once they can display a client what sort of area can look as well as change points through demand, immediately, the likelihood of obtaining a purchase tend to be very enhanced.

It is great for client also, because they are more expected to find the last item - it could be a kitchen area, restroom, room or other area - they needed.

Program businesses have experienced this particular there have become especially created bundles such as kitchen area layout program as well as restroom layout program, almost all that contain the effectiveness of 3-d computer system assisted designing.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Naked tax protest in front of German Chancellor's office

We never quite thought we'd see this. From Spiegel Online: a naked tax protest by Attac-Germany, with calls for unitary taxation and country by country reporting.



The messages on the big poster are "Reveal balance sheets" and "Unitary tax now" and "FKK for corporations"(in German, "FKK" refers to "Freikörperkultur," - a reference to naturists, or people who like to be naked. They want corporations to reveal themselves too.)

Read more about unitary tax here, and about country by country reporting here.

Hat tip: Markus Henn.

Friday, September 6, 2013

The G20 leaders' statement, in relevant part

For those who haven't yet read the G20 leaders' statement today, here is the part that particularly interests us:
51. In a context of severe fiscal consolidation and social hardship, in many countries ensuring that all taxpayers pay their fair share of taxes is more than ever a priority. Tax avoidance, harmful practices and aggressive tax planning have to be tackled.

The growth of the digital economy also poses challenges for international taxation. We fully endorse the ambitious and comprehensive Action Plan – originated in the OECD – aimed at addressing base erosion and profit shifting with mechanism to enrich the Plan as appropriate. We welcome the establishment of the G20/OECD BEPS project and we encourage all interested countries to participate. Profits should be taxed where economic activities deriving the profits are performed and where value is created.

In order to minimize BEPS, we call on member countries to examine how our own domestic laws contribute to BEPS and to ensure that international and our own tax rules do not allow or encourage multinational enterprises to reduce overall taxes paid by artificially shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions. We acknowledge that effective taxation of mobile income is one of the key challenges. We look forward to regular reporting on the development of proposals and recommendations to tackle the 15 issues identified in the Action Plan and commit to take the necessary individual and collective action with the paradigm of sovereignty taken into consideration.

51.    We commend the progress recently achieved in the area of tax transparency and we fully endorse the OECD proposal for a truly global model for multilateral and bilateral automatic exchange of information. Calling on all other jurisdictions to join us by the earliest possible date, we are committed to automatic exchange of information as the new global standard, which must ensure confidentiality and the proper use of information exchanged, and we fully support the OECD work with G20 countries aimed at presenting such a new single global standard for automatic exchange of information by February 2014 and to finalizing technical modalities of effective automatic exchange by mid-2014.

In parallel, we expect to begin to exchange information automatically on tax matters among G20 members by the end of 2015. We call on all countries to join the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters without further delay. We look forward to the practical and full implementation of the new standard on a global scale. We encourage the Global Forum to complete the allocation of comprehensive country ratings regarding the effective implementation of information exchange upon request and ensure that the implementation of the standards are monitored on a continuous basis. We urge all jurisdictions to address the Global Forum recommendations in particular those 14 that have not yet moved to Phase 2. We invite the Global Forum to draw on the work of the FATF with respect to beneficial ownership. We also ask the Global Forum to establish a mechanism to monitor and review the implementation of the new global standard on automatic exchange of information.

52.    Developing countries should be able to reap the benefits of a more transparent international tax system, and to enhance their revenue capacity, as mobilizing domestic resources is critical to financing development. We recognize the importance of all countries benefitting from greater tax information exchange. We are committed to make automatic exchange of information attainable by all countries, including LICs, and will seek to provide capacity building support to them. We call on the Development Working Group in conjunction with the Finance Track, to work with the OECD, the Global Forum and other IOs to develop a roadmap showing how developing countries can overcome obstacles to participation in the emerging new standard in automatic exchange of information, and to assist them in meeting the standard in accordance with the action envisaged in the St Petersburg Development Outlook. The Working Group should report back by our next meeting.

Working with international organizations, we will continue to share our expertise, help build capacity, and engage in long-term partnership programmes to secure success. In this respect, we welcome the OECD Tax Inspectors without Borders initiative, which aims to share knowledge and increase domestic capacities in developing countries in the tax area. Finally, we are committed to continue to assist developing countries, including through the IOs, in identifying individual country needs and building capacity in the area of tax administration (in addition to automatic exchange of information) and encourage such support to be developing country led.
With tax annex here.

Reminder: we have commented on the G20 process already today, here.

Overall summary: this is rather short on specifics, and falls far short of some of the recommendations we have made (such as this one), but we have come a long way from even a couple of years ago. 
We are, of course, delighted to see official support for the Tax Inspectors Without Borders initiative, which is a proposal that TJN put to a government conference in Bonn, Germany, in 2011, and which rapidly found political support from a wide range of countries. 

Netherlands officially admits shame in being a tax haven, pledges limited reforms

Frans Weekers
We have long criticised the Netherlands for being a particularly important tax haven for multinational companies. As, increasingly, have many others in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. We recently noted, too, how some developing countries have been kicking back at some of the abuses that have been perpetrated upon them with the help of the Netherlands and other tax havens.

We are now delighted to see a Financial Times interview Netherlands’ deputy finance minister, Frans Weekers, making an admission that his government is uncomfortable with, and perhaps even ashamed of, the Netherlands' role in this pernicious trade. The Financial Times reports:
"A proposal by the Netherlands to renegotiate its tax treaties with 23 least-developed countries marks a turning point for a country that has until now deflected accusations that it is a key player in tax avoidance by multinational corporations.

The initiative, which comes as the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg is putting tax harmonisation issues high on the agenda, is the most concrete move yet by the Netherlands to address the criticisms. Tax justice advocates say the country’s network of treaties with over 90 countries makes it a nexus for tax avoidance, allowing multinationals to reroute their profits through Dutch “letterbox companies” that do no real business in the Netherlands and exist largely for tax purposes."
This comes in the context and the spirit of today's G20 leaders' declaration, which includes a statement that:
"We call on member countries to examine how our own domestic laws contribute to BEPS [TJN: Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, OECD-speak for corporate tax dodging] and to ensure that international and our own tax rules do not allow or encourage multinational enterprises to reduce overall taxes paid by artificially shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions."
There is, of course, far less to the Dutch plans than Weekers' words would perhaps suggest. The FT article describes an official Dutch report presented last week, which seeks to insert new anti-fraud provisions in their tax treaties with the 23 countries; will pass on information to tax authorities in developing countries; and will 'crack down' on letterbox companies with no genuine substance behind them. The article also cites our excellent Dutch NGO colleagues at SOMO as saying, among other things, that new demands for letterbox companies to have 'substance' will be too easy to comply with.

In a brief email to TJN, Lee Sheppard of Tax Analysts spoke of the Dutch
"promises to put more 'substance' in shell companies MNCs [Multinational Corporations] use. Turns out the "substance" ain't gonna be much."
(For those interested, more details on this lack of substance in the Annex below.)

Despite this disappointment in the detail -- as is so often the case with shiny-looking tax justice-styled reforms, or world leaders' statements on these kinds of issues -- the broad new public statement by the Dutch authorities is welcome. The headline announcement is politically significant, and an official admission that the tax justice movement, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, has had a point all along.

Today's blogger remembers a tax justice meeting in Amsterdam a few years ago when a top Dutch tax official gave a horribly patronising presentation, seeking to pooh-pooh a seminal report by SOMO pointing out the damage that the Netherlands was transmitting globally through these practices. But, as the FT report continues, this attitude is changing:
“Over the past 10 years the trend has been for the number of letterbox companies in the Netherlands to keep growing. I want to turn that trend around,” Mr Weekers said. “I see the Netherlands being portrayed in a bad light. I don’t want to be portrayed in a bad light.
The Dutch move stems from a government-commissioned report over the summer which, for the first time, agreed with tax-justice groups that developing countries miss out on substantial tax revenues because of their treaties with the Netherlands.”
Here is a clear and public admission by the Netherlands government that this tax haven activity is causing great harm around the world. Or, to put it more succinctly, Tax Havens Cause Poverty.

Which, of course, immediately raises the next question: why stop at 23 countries? And why stop at these limited measures?

The logic points inexorably in one direction: the Netherlands should work towards rolling up this whole sordid industry and starting to compete on the basis of genuine business activity.

We urge other nations engaged in this shameful trade - such as Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Belgium, the United Kingdom and others - to take note.

For those with a Financial Times subscription, there is a whole lot more in the FT story.

Update from SOMO, via e-mail:
"Next week there will be a Round Table, organised by the Dutch Parliament about national tax policies in order for them to gain more insights on the matter. Tax Justice Network Netherlands as well as SOMO will participate as speakers, a.k.a. spokespersons for a fair tax system."
Annex update: a Dutch correspondent sent us this commentary on the relative lack of substance, via e-mail:
"About the substance demands: the government does not propose to raise or increase the substance demands, they only want to expand the group of companies that have to comply with them. Right now, only companies applying for a tax ruling (Advance Pricing Agreement or Advance Tax Ruling) have to meet the requirements. This will change so that all companies that function as a vehicle for channeling through royalty and interest payments (so called "schakelvennootschapen" which would be literally translated into "linking companies") have to meet these requirements.

The problem is, as you already pointed out in the blog, that the substance requirements are much too easy to comply with. The government, in their reaction published last Friday, actually said that it carried out a random sample and found that most "linking companies" already comply with the requirements. Requirements include things like: at least half of board members have to live or be "officially situated" in the Netherlands, they need to have "the necessary professional knowledge to carry out their tasks", the (important) management decisions need to be taken in the Netherlands, the company needs to have an address situated in the Netherlands, and the company needs to have equity that is "fitting for the activities it carries out". 

As you can see, all requirements are fairly easy to fulfill and open for interpretation. The government, however, stated that - based on research published earlier this summer - there's no point in raising the requirements by for example asking for a number of employees, since this will lose all effect if companies find a way of hiring personnel without increasing their real economic activity. The mailbox companies indeed already do the same with recruiting board members: trust offices offer companies to find Dutch board members, which are persons that are member of numerous boards at the same time.

So the Dutch governement, by saying that they do not raise substance requirements "since that will have no effect", combined with finding that almost all companies concerned already meet the existing requirements, are seemingly taking a kind of useless measure to obligate all "linking companies"  to comply with current requirements. It seems an empty measure really." 

OECD and G20: How Long Will it Take on Tax?

Update: the G20 statement is now available.

The OECD has reported to today’s G20 Leaders meeting in St Petersburg on its tax work. This now falls into three areas, covering two issues.

First, transparency and exchange of information on tax. We should remember that this resulted from a much earlier initiative by the then G7, when Russia was still waiting in the wings and the developing countries such as the BRICS were not even candidates to be considered leading states.

The concerns at that time about tax havens and the offshore secrecy system led the G7 to ask for an OECD initiative, and the result was its report in 1998 on Harmful Tax Competition.  This project was of course effectively derailed by a change in US policy, when the new Bush administration accepted arguments that the initiative as first formulated entailed dictating tax policy to other states. The project then refocused on obtaining information from tax havens, laboriously pursued by the OECD for nearly a decade by negotiation of bilateral tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs). Only now, after the fiscal crisis of 2007-8, has this effort for fiscal transparency produced the commitment at this year’s G8 summit meeting in Lough Erne to establish a new global standard of automatic exchange of tax information, as well as transparency of beneficial ownership. Yet this is what organisations like TJN called for from the start. Until recently, we were laughed at: now it is mainstream.

So the OECD now has two transparency projects. The first, based on bilateral agreements for exchange of information on request, is coordinated through the so-called Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, which conducts `peer reviews’ on each country. Second, the new standard which has finally been proclaimed is for multilateral automatic exchange of information. The OECD now aims to develop a model for this to be ready next year. The key is of course establishing suitable technical systems to ensure effective use can be made of such large quantities of data that will emerge from automatic information exchange. The OECD has in fact been working on this for some 30 years, largely in secret, so it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

The third area is of course "Base Erosion and Profit Shifting" (BEPS), a project looking at corporate tax avoidance which the OECD launched quietly in July 2012, and was then given a political impetus by the G8 and the G20. After a year’s work, it published an Action Plan on  July 19th 2013. This envisages a 30-month work programme on 15 Action Points, aimed essentially at trying to repair the international tax system. We gave our immediate response to the Plan at the time, regretting that the OECD had chosen to try to repair a fundamentally flawed system that cannot be effectively fixed, and rejecting the new 21st Century approach that we think is needed. In our view, the OECD has allowed the G20 leaders to kick the can down the road, proposing a plan which will face enormous obstacles, and may prove largely ineffective. We will continue to keep a close watch, and will have much more to say as the work proceeds.

What can be learned from comparing the two initiatives? Only after 15 years’ pressure from civil society has the OECD now accepted the global standard of multilateral automatic exchange of information. We hope that it will not take quite so long for it to accept that the only effective way to take transnational corporations is to treat them as unitary firms, based on Combined and Country-by-Country reporting and profit apportionment based on their real presence in each country.

See also this policy briefing, co-signed by the Tax Justice Network and 33 other organisations, focusing on the BEPS initiative.

Two new tax haven items in UK parliament, pushing transparency

First, an Early Day Motion, from Wednesday:
"That this House notes with concern that one in five tax havens worldwide are under UK jurisdiction; further notes that although all the British Overseas Territories have committed to joining the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, none have actually done so and no time-frame has been set in which they will do so; further notes that the island of Sark, where income tax is set at zero per cent will not come under the new agreement signed by Guernsey so will be exempt from oversight on beneficial ownership; believes that clarification on when the register of beneficial ownership will come into force, which British Overseas Territories will sign up to the Register and whether it will be publicly accessible is required as a matter of urgency; observes that while the automatic sharing of tax information will aid transparency, it will not in itself alter the tax regimes which made these territories attractive to companies and individuals aiming to minimise their taxes; and calls on the Government to take action both domestically and internationally to tackle the use of tax havens by multinational companies and individuals operating in the UK or in territories under its jurisdiction."
We would support that.

We would also like to draw attention to this important parliamentary bill on corporate transparency; United Kingdom Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill, which
"aims to tackle the opacity that exists in the affairs of multinational corporations"
and, more specifically,
"any UK multinational corporation must publish the accounts of all its subsidiaries on public record, and if nowhere else that must be on its own web site."
and something else of significance:
"the Bill tackles the opacity in the tax affairs of both large companies and wealthy individuals in the UK by requiring that the tax returns of the top 250 in each group should be put on public record.
. . .
Most of the rest of the Bill focuses on ensuring that the beneficial ownership of companies and trusts is placed on public record when the public interest requires it."
See this letter from UK MP Michael Meacher, the bill's sponsor, here. With a summary overview of the issues at Tax Research, here.