Finance committee  As you've gathered, I would prefer simplicity, and the last thing you can describe FATCA as is simple. It is clearly a very complex way of dealing with it, so I don't think it's ideal. I believe that Europe is actually going to provide a better model for this. The European Unio

Finance committee  The U.K. government has spent a lot more money trying to discredit my number than it's ever invested in actually trying to get the number right, and that's an unfortunate use of funds. There is a fundamentally different approach between the two of us. They take the tax returns

Finance committee  I think that's an important question. My big concern is—and we've heard a lot of discussion this morning about what is in the bank's records about who owns an account, where it's owned, and who the owner of a corporation is. The big problem we have is that that information is in

Finance committee  May I?

Finance committee  For all practical purposes, tax information exchange agreements are completely useless. Signing one is a complete waste of time. You will discover that some place like Jersey, which has 50% of its economy dependent upon financial services and has had a TIEA with the U.S.A., for e

Finance committee  The report we produced last year, The Price of Offshore Revisited, looked at this issue and basically said that at the end of the day the biggest problem is with high-net-worth individuals. Those are people who have free assets of more than $1 million. Actually, the real core p

Finance committee  Well, I'm a democrat. I believe in the power of the ballot box. President Hollande, I think, went with a mandate to impose that tax, so I can't see how I can say he's a crook when he actually got an electoral mandate to impose it. So I don't see that issue at all, and never have

Finance committee  My experience is not in Canada, so I can't answer for the CRA. I can answer in the U.K. context, and some other European country contexts, which I know. I would certainly say my experience here is that they're doing exactly as you've described. There is a much higher probabilit

Finance committee  I think the transfer pricing issue is an extremely complex one. The problem with transfer pricing is that it is fundamentally intellectually flawed, because you're trying to tax each company as if it were independent of all others inside the same group of which it's a member. But

Finance committee  Look, the first principle of a tax system is to find the tax base, what you're going to tax. At the moment, the problem is that we can't find the tax base. My design for an information exchange system would simply be saying that this person has an account in this tax haven and C

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes, I did. I do agree. I think it's absolutely essential. The price of limited liability is accountability, and that's what's missing.

Finance committee  Yes, there is obviously a difference of emphasis required. I think this understanding of the role of the tax haven as a conduit is incredibly important. What “offshore” means in this context is “not here”. It does not mean a geographical concept. It just means not here. What an o

Finance committee  I agree wholeheartedly. It's got to happen.

Finance committee  May I come back on that for one moment?