Sir, – Karlin's Lillington is of course correct in highlighting that the holes in the corporate tax system are not only to be found in Ireland ("US should fix its own lax tax system before attacking Ireland", Business Opinion, February 21st).
The argument in the piece is essentially that other countries, in particular the US, should get their own house in order before pointing the finger at Ireland.
But the whataboutery involved in pointing out other countries’ failings is ultimately self-defeating, and blinds us to the problematic truth of Ireland’s tax code.
We have, in the words of former minister for finance Michael Noonan, played hard, but fair, when it comes to winning inward investment.
And arguably, we have won these tax wars, in that we have secured investment from US multinational companies at the expense of other larger countries, like Germany and France. It’s one in the eye for our jealous larger neighbours, and one that we should not apologise for, so the argument goes.
However, it gets a little more difficult to justify when the people we compete against, and that we get the upper hand on, are some of the poorest countries in the world.
Previous Christian Aid reports have laid bare (as reported in this newspaper) that Ireland’s tax code has a negative impact on developing countries – that it is sucking vital revenue away from developing countries and into Ireland.
Sales of a company with a presence in both Ireland and Ghana, for example, can see sales made in Ghana be recorded in Ireland, through exploiting one of the gaps in the increasingly à la carte Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) base-erosion and profit-shifting (Beps) action points.
These are the unintended but inevitable consequences of an economic policy that has a battle-hardened, finely honed tax offering at its core.
In an interconnected world, where companies can move money easily from one jurisdiction to another, tax wars are inevitably going to have winners and losers.
Ireland is currently winning, but doing so on the backs of some of the poorest countries in the world leaves a very bitter after-taste. It’s beyond time that Ireland got ahead of the game and moved to routinely assess its tax policies from a human rights perspective.
Will a particular policy, for example, impact negatively on Zambia’s ability to tax corporations and generate the money to fund public services in Zambia?
If the answer is yes, then surely we in Ireland should be thinking long and hard about the sustainability of our economic model.
No amount of whataboutery can deflect away from that reality. – Is mise,
SORLEY McCAUGHEY,
Head of Advocacy
and Policy,
Christian Aid Ireland,
Canal House,
Canal Road,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.