A Tax Map of Global Professional Service Firms: Where Expert Services are Located and Why

The role of multi-disciplinary Global Professional Service Firms (GPSFs) in the architecture of international tax abuse has been very little studied. Although it has been known that some of these firms operate in many of the world’s secrecy jurisdictions the scale of their activity in these, and other, locations has been little understood. Nor has their own representations of their tax services been appropriately considered. This working paper seeks to redress this deficiency. We locate the activities of these firms in the broader context of their activities around the globe, since it is the boast of many of them that they operate in more than 140 jurisdictions, worldwide. The research has revealed the opacity of the data surrounding these firms, and the unusual nature of their ownership structures. Financial reports of these firms are not available for most jurisdictions in which they work, whilst common control through ownership structures rarely crosses national boundaries. Using global directories of the firms as indication of presence in a location and the number of employees by jurisdiction as an indication of scale, our research indicates the disproportionate activity of particular GPSFs firms, namely the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms, providing tax based services in secrecy jurisdictions. This suggests that they are major suppliers of offshore financial services. We consider the evolution of these GPSFs since the 1990s, suggesting they have been conscious participants in this activity but that their behaviour has adapted over time to reflect prevailing taxation morés to preserve the reputations of those supplying these services. As we show, these morés are reflected in their own presentation of their services as promoted on their web sites, which have changed significantly over time to reflect this fact, with little evidence that there has been any real underlying change in behaviour. As a result we suggest that these firms display a form of adaptive behaviour worthy of further study

Auditing with accountability : shrinking the opportunity spaces for audit failure

In recent years a number of high-profile company failures have raised fundamental questions about the willingness and/or ability of auditors to exercise the professional scepticism necessary for the production of robust audits. This report, co-written by Adam Leaver at the University of Sheffield and Leonard Seabrooke, Saila Stausholm and Duncan Wigan at Copenhagen Business School, examines the causes of those failures and makes a series of recommendations on how to resolve them. The report argues that audit failure takes place within a particular configuration of economic, cultural and regulatory arrangements which create the 'opportunity spaces' for poor practice. Shrinking those opportunity spaces therefore requires a multi-dimensional response, including the structural separation of audit and non-audit functions, a more robust system of fines and the integration of a civil society voice into the reform process to prevent regulatory capture

Når gode råd er dyre: Rådgivermagt og skat i Danmark

Når magten i Danmark skal udredes, bør der rettes fokus mod en særlig gruppe af eksperter, som rådgiver både stater, virksomheder og privatpersoner i skattespørgsmål. Som rådgivere har disse eksperter opnået en form for diskret magt: deres arbejde er afgørende for både udformningen og udmøntningen af vores skattesystem, men undersøges og diskuteres sjældent. Betydningen af rådgivernes magt er særligt relevant i lyset af deres bidrag til skattespekulation og stigende ulighed. I denne artikel giver vi et overblik over eksisterende forskning om disse eksperter og beskriver deres virke i Danmark samt udlægger, hvordan skatteeksperter udøver både instrumentel, strukturel og infrastrukturel magt. Vi foreslår en række forskningsspørgsmål, som fokuserer bredt på rådgivernes indflydelse på demokratiet, og som bør tages op i afdækningen af denne ”rådgivermagt”

Shoulder rotational strength profiles of danish national level badminton players

Background Increased age has been shown to be associated with weaker external rotators and stronger internal rotators of the shoulder in pitchers and tennis players. Whether this age-associated change is present in elite badminton players is unknown. Purpose To compare the internal and external rotation strength of the shoulder in adolescent and adult elite badminton players. Study design Cross-sectional. Methods Thirty-one adolescent (12 females aged 16.8 ± 1.6 years and 19 males aged 17.1 ± 1.6 years) and 29 adult (10 females aged 25 ± 2.9 years and 19 males aged 26.2 ± 4.6 years) national level badminton players were tested pre-seasonally for external rotation (ER) and internal rotation (IR) isometric muscle strength bilaterally, using a hand-held dynamometer. Within-group ER to IR strength ratios were calculated (ER/IR×100%). Results The adolescents had stronger shoulder ER than the adults on both sides (p < 0.05). The adult males tended to have stronger IR of the dominant shoulder than the adolescent males (p = 0.071). In the dominant shoulders, the strength ratios for adult females and males were 77% and 78%, respectively, while the same ratio for adolescent females and males were 85% and 99%, respectively. In the non-dominant shoulders, the ER/IR strength ratios for adult females and males were 90% and 87%, respectively, while the ratios for adolescent females and males were 116% and 102%, respectively. Conclusion This study is the first to demonstrate that in shoulder injury-free national team badminton players, adolescents have stronger shoulder ER than adults on both sides. Therefore, increased age appears to be associated with weaker shoulder ER muscles in elite badminton players.publishedVersio

Against hollow firms : repurposing the corporation for a more resilient economy

The Covid-19 pandemic is revealing latent weaknesses at large, well-established companies who may now require state support. This report argues that those weaknesses pre-date the current pandemic and are a consequence of excesses in the non-financial corporate sector during the post-2008 economy. Those excesses include: i) historically high levels of dividends and buybacks which, in many cases, exceeded earnings and hollowed out reserves ii) the growth of low-prime debt, which risks being downgraded to junk in the current crisis and iii) a build-up of ‘fair valued’ assets, often intangible assets such as goodwill, which are vulnerable to write downs that could push firms into negative shareholder equity

Density functional theory based screening of ternary alkali-transition metal borohydrides: A computational material design project

The dissociation of molecules, even the most simple hydrogen molecule, cannot be described accurately within density functional theory because none of the currently available functionals accounts for strong on-site correlation. This problem led to a discussion of properties that the local Kohn-Sham potential has to satisfy in order to correctly describe strongly correlated systems. We derive an analytic expression for the nontrivial form of the Kohn-Sham potential in between the two fragments for the dissociation of a single bond. We show that the numerical calculations for a one-dimensional two-electron model system indeed approach and reach this limit. It is shown that the functional form of the potential is universal, i.e., independent of the details of the two fragments.We acknowledge funding by the Spanish MEC (Grant No. FIS2007-65702-C02-01), “Grupos Consolidados UPV/EHU del Gobierno Vasco” (Grant No. IT-319-07), and the European Community through e-I3 ETSF project (Grant Agreement No. 211956).Peer reviewe

Assets in Periphery, Agents in the Core: Mapping the Micro Structures of International Tax Planning

In the last two decades, tax avoidance has risen to the top of the agenda of policy makers and international organizations. The majority of political action and academic research has focused on the macro-level of states, pointing towards the responsibility of ‘tax havens’ or ‘offshore financial centers’. Research on the micro-level has demonstrated the importance of non-state actors who facilitate tax planning, but tax advisors have never been studied systematically with global data. In this paper, we connect the micro and macro levels. We map tax advisors geographically using a novel empirical approach based on LinkedIn. We show that tax advisors generally locate in large cities in the EU and OECD, rather than in places targeted as ‘tax havens’. We further consider what determines the locations of tax advisors. Using multiple regression analysis, we find that locations of tax advisors does not correlate with the location of corporate profits, financial secrecy, or economic activity. Rather, it correlates with the managerial and financial activity. Our results underscore the core-periphery structure in offshore finance. Effective regulation of tax avoidance should focus on tax advisors, not only on the destination of money flows, since the active facilitation does not occur in those places