ISA limit reached.

grey_gym_sock

bowlhead99 wrote: »

You presume wrong: the 'automatic' bit means the Caymans give HMRC information about the Cayman financial accounts of UK resident individuals or UK companies, or other passive holding companies whose ultimate controllers are UK resident individuals, on an annual basis - without HMRC needing to ask for it. It is a fixed annual exchange every September, which the banks and financial institutions facilitate by reporting to their local tax authority at some point between year end and that date it's going to be passed on to HMRC.

ok, interesting. however, they can only do that if they know who the ultimate controller is, and (so far) there are still ownership structures for which they won't know, right?

By 'information about financial accounts' that I mentioned above, I mean for bank accounts: the balances, interest and other credits; for brokerage accounts: balances, dividend receipts, interest income, proceeds of investment redemptions, amounts withdrawn; for investment funds: values/balances and distributions/redemptions; also cash value insurance contracts. It is not just deposit accounts.

And neither it is not just accounts held by individuals, it is accounts held by UK companies or by holding companies controlled by UK resident individuals (or for trusts, those controlled by UK trustees or settled by UK residents or whose beneficiaries are UK residents).

ah, i didn't know about the breadth of info being reported. but this still depends on knowing who the controller/settler/beneficiary is. which may be obscured. for instance, you can set up a trust in a straightforward way, with named beneficiaries, so it's clear who they are; but can't you also set it up in a more obscure way, where there is perhaps a class of potential beneficiaries, but everybody can, strictly speaking, deny they're a beneficiary? control can be obscured via nominee directors.

If you are a UK resident who has set up a Luxembourg holding company with your wife to hold an investment in a Bermudan hedge fund, and also to have the 'Lux-co' invest into a BVI holding company which will in turn then open up a bank account in Cayman and invest into a private investment fund in Guernsey...

... then at the end of the year, the Bermudan hedge fund will report the balance of the Luxembourg holdco's equity interest in it, together with the gross credits and redemption proceeds taken by Lux-co during the year, with your and your wife's name stamped on it, to HMRC. Meanwhile, the Cayman bank will report the bank account balance and interest earned by the BVI holding company to the Cayman authority, with your and your wife's name stamped on it, who will report that on to HMRC. At the same time the Guernsey investment fund will report the value of the BVI company's holding together with any redemption proceeds, to Guernsey tax authority, with your names on it, who will pass it to HMRC.

that's 3 of the 5 overseas jurisdictions reporting back. what about the other 2 (luxembourg and BVI)?

but while it's interesting that you can set up a complex chain of ownership, and still have it reported to HMRC, the more important point is can you avoid reporting, by methods such as using a non-compliant jurisdiction at a crucial step, or using complex ownership structures which the reporting doesn't cover properly, or just having some financial intermediary break a law somewhere. (though if we get to the point when it's necessary to break laws to maintain secrecy, that certainly is progress.)

This data has been exchanged going back to 2014. For the current year, the expansion of automatic exchange of info for tax purposes covers a lot more countries ; so for example if your Luxco opens up a bank account in Mexico or South Africa, the banks in those two countries will (via their local tax authorities) tell both Luxembourg tax authority and UK HMRC next summer what the balance was at year end and what was earned there.

If you have a deposit account in Argentina and your wife has a broker in Faroe Islands, they are both getting reported to HMRC for 2016 too (and if you do it through your BVI holdco instead, you still get reported, because no bank or broker in Argentina or the Faroes is going to open up an account for a BVI holdco without knowing who the owner /controlling party is). When your BVI co goes to open up their accounts, the firms would want the BVI and Lux corporate documentation (showing the shareholder and director registers) to satisfy their anti-money laundering rules, and they would want your NI number or UTR to satisfy their tax reporting rules.

shareholder and director info - no problem. but they may be nominee shareholders and directors, right?

So, sure, there is more to do, which includes the stuff you were talking about - "public registers of the beneficial ownership of companies", but there is plenty of reporting happening already, which the financial services industry has spent loads of money on in the last few years.

The public register stuff is not going to happen in a lot of jurisdictions, it will just be for tax and law enforcement to look at, not for the general public to have a gander, nor for the press to go on fishing expeditions. In the UK, the legislation for registers of "people with significant control" only came in this April and we were the first place in the world to do it. The crown dependencies / overseas territories like Channel Islands and Cayman won't start to bring it in until next year, because they have taken some convincing and negotiating to get on side.

"the press to go on fishing expeditions" - yes, that's part of why i want as much as possible on public record. to assist with investigations of powerful corporations and individuals.

But someone like Donald Trump is never going to bring in public registers for his country, because he's "pro business" and anti regulations. I can set up a new company in Delaware today, and no member of the public will know who really owns it and I'll never have to file any accounts with their equivalent of Companies House.

i think this will take a long time to achieve anyway. longer than trump will be president.

but there is plenty to be done nearer to home.

for instance, it was being pointed out recently that scottish limited partnerships can be used to obscure ownership (and hence to evade/avoid tax).

and the UK is more generally a popular jurisdiction for people looking for secrecy. the UK's companies house does pretty much nothing about companies not following the rules, except striking them off the register after a while. (because they have minimal resources for enforcement.)

so info about large beneficial holdings will be required, which is a very positive step. but compliance may effectively be on the "honour system".

my overall point is that it is worth keeping up pressure on governments (including the UK), to make this stuff more effective.

grey_gym_sock

ArmyDilllo wrote: »

I resent;
1) the rate of income tax I've been required to pay and would have to continue paying had I not followed the Government's options to avoid paying it.

so are you proposing that it would be better, rather than having the current rates of income tax and various schemes (e.g. ISAs, pensions) by which we can legitimately reduce the income tax we pay, it would be better to have lower rates of income tax, but scrap those schemes? so that the about same amount of income tax would be raised in total, but we wouldn't have to faff around with working out how to minimize the tax we pay?

if that's it, then i agree. (though in practice, income tax rates could only be marginally lower, if this is to be tax-neutral overall.)

....... or : are you proposing to cut income tax significantly (i.e. raise less money overall via income tax), and instead either:
a) raise other tax (which ones?); or
b) cut public spending (which bits of it?); or
c) just let the deficit rise (and of course, it wouldn't necessarily rise by the amount of the tax cut, because the economy is a dynamic system, and cutting 1 tax may lead people to spend or invest the money, which may result in more being raised in other taxes, etc, etc)

And,
2) the rate of income tax I've been required to pay and would have to continue paying had I not followed the Government's options to avoid paying it, compared to those who have been and are much more able to pay it than me and 95% of the rest of the country.

i think you said you've earned something close to the national average? yes, there are more ways out of paying tax for people on much higher incomes (e.g. pensions save a lot more tax for higher-rate taxpayers). i would agree with the idea of removing some of those advantages for people on higher incomes - if that's what you mean.

Even after freeing myself from the shackles of Income Tax, the amount of "secondary" taxes I'm expected to pay are still approaching half of my previous income.

well, make your mind up.

if we got rid of a lot of the secondary taxes, then income tax would have to be higher.

OTOH, if we cut the amount raised by income tax, we'd need to raise more via secondary taxes.

if you want people on higher incomes to pay more, you should be more in favour of income tax, and less in favour the secondary taxes. because income tax is the 1 major progressive tax in the UK (i.e. people pay a higher percentage of their income in income tax as they get richer). most of the other taxes are regressive.

grey_gym_sock

singhini wrote: »

Tomorrow we will cover "hyperinflation"

not sure i'll be able to face reading about hyperinflation after xmas dinner

bigadaj

grey_gym_sock wrote: »

not sure i'll be able to face reading about hyperinflation after xmas dinner

I'm alright, I've got my loose trousers on today.

bowlhead99

grey_gym_sock wrote: »

ok, interesting. however, they can only do that if they know who the ultimate controller is, and (so far) there are still ownership structures for which they won't know, right?

It's a combination of self-certification by the customer of the financial institution, and the relevant financial institution reviewing their records and supporting documents for indicia to the contrary.

Yes, your inevitable reply of "well, that's not perfect, because everyone using an offshore jurisdiction is a criminal anyway and will do what they can to throw you off the scent" is partially correct; some of the people using offshore jurisdictions are criminals and there will be some people who will escape reporting. Short of using the solution from Aliens ("I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure") there is no 100% foolproof and crimeproof panacea that's practical to implement.

ah, i didn't know about the breadth of info being reported. but this still depends on knowing who the controller/settler/beneficiary is. which may be obscured. for instance, you can set up a trust in a straightforward way, with named beneficiaries, so it's clear who they are; but can't you also set it up in a more obscure way, where there is perhaps a class of potential beneficiaries, but everybody can, strictly speaking, deny they're a beneficiary?

So the bank or other financial institution that maintains the account would be reporting the trustee, the protector, the settlor and the known beneficiaries. Those are the instructions they have, based on it being agreed at OECD level and then the individual countries going away to set up their local regulations to implement this common reporting standard. If for example the trustee was corporate (but not themselves a financial institution) the controllers of the trustee would be reported too.

If someone is only a potential beneficiary but not actually receiving distributions, the guidance to banks is that they don't have to be reported if the bank has a way of identifying when they start receiving distributions; which usually they won't, so they should err on the side of caution and report them anyway. However, in some countries the banks won't see the full trust deeds, only extracts, and some trust deeds give trustees more discretion so a beneficiary might not be obvious or even named. In those cases people could escape reporting. See "nuke the site from orbit" reference above.

control can be obscured via nominee directors.

The directors usually get identified and checked out for money-laundering purposes ofc, because they have primary day to day control of the bank accounts, investment accounts etc; but if you set up a chain of overseas companies to hold your financial assets, the tax authorities are mostly concerned with the fact that you're the beneficial owner of the assets. They're not so bothered about who you appointed as a nominee director to sign documents for the holding companies. There are 7 billion people I could appoint to sign my company's documents and HMRC isn't going to go chasing them all down if their role is to act as a nominee director rather than actually be a shareholder and own the assets.

Typically 'control' in a corporate sense is about ownership above a certain threshold (eg 10% or 25% on a look-through basis) rather than day to day control, as for example the shareholders can simply replace the directors at their own whim. So it is the shareholders of the holding companies that are getting reported. The banks generally don't have to report directors for the purposes of the automatic exchange of financial info for tax purposes anyway, unless there is no shareholder that is considered a controller by % ownership or other means.

that's 3 of the 5 overseas jurisdictions reporting back. what about the other 2 (luxembourg and BVI)?

The example I gave was just to illustrate that the banks and investment funds are reporting data about the controllers of the holding companies who to the home tax authorities of those ultimate owners who might sit several levels higher.

In the example, the BVI holdco had a bank account in Cayman and an investment fund in Guernsey. So those institutions in Cayman and Guernsey are reporting the details of the BVI holdco's financial accounts to their local tax authorities (together with the name of the UK resident ultimate owners), and then the local tax authorities exchange the information with HMRC.

If there is no bank account in BVI, because the BVI co does its banking and investments in Cayman and Guernsey, no BVI bank will be reporting the balance or interest credits to the BVI tax authority. So BVI tax authority in that example have nothing to report to HMRC. Same logic for Luxembourg.

But assuming for example that you set up a bank account in Luxembourg for your Lux holding co (to lend legitimacy to your argument with HMRC that the company is Lux resident and not UK resident) then yes the relevant Lux bank will be asking questions about the ownership of the Lux company and reporting its balances to HMRC. I just missed it out because the example was long enough

but while it's interesting that you can set up a complex chain of ownership, and still have it reported to HMRC, the more important point is can you avoid reporting, by methods such as using a non-compliant jurisdiction at a crucial step,

In the example above, a BVI holdco was running Cayman bank accounts and investing in a Guernsey investment fund, and both Cayman and Guernsey were reporting you directly to HMRC, which they would do whether or not BVI was signed up to the same scheme and whether or not BVI had agreed that it wanted to receive data from them.

There are plenty of obscure jurisdictions on OECD's 'common reporting standards' list. Turks and Caicos are reporting 2016 data next summer. Kitts and Nevis don't start until the year after (along with other far flung places from Antigua or Aruba to Brunei or Ghana or Panama). Yes of course there will be jurisdictions that are less willing or able to cooperate. The ones that want to be seen as credible financial centres will sign up and the ones that don't participate in these initiatives will become harder to do business with.

or using complex ownership structures which the reporting doesn't cover properly, or just having some financial intermediary break a law somewhere. (though if we get to the point when it's necessary to break laws to maintain secrecy, that certainly is progress.)

Basically you are not going to get all the way through complex ownership structures that have 50 levels between the account at the bottom and the controller at the top.

When a company wants a new account and has a crazy ownership structure, the bank will either turn down the business because it's too complex and they don't want the regulatory fallout, or they'll accept it, having decided that they have got as far as they can practically go - and just take on the business without anyone identified as being reportable other than some puppet director.

In choosing the latter option they might presume they won't get one of those multimillion dollar fines being bandied about, as long as their processes aren't wholly deficient.

Some here would argue that if you aren't actually going to catch the most fervent tax evading terrorist, and you are going to put the banks and brokers and investment funds and global tax authorities through massive inconvenience and create hurdles for genuine customers, and all the income the tax authorities get as extra tax is no bigger than the aggregate expenses of the tax authorities and the financial institutions together, you might as well not bother with any of this new and complex regulation.

Certainly there are complaints from people on this board all the time about how disgraceful it is that they have to give their national insurance number and provide identification when all they want to do is open a bank account. And those people mostly haven't had to do that hoop-jumping for a chain of corporates and trusts!

shareholder and director info - no problem. but they may be nominee shareholders and directors, right?

Nominee directors are less relevant, as mentioned above.

For nominee shareholdings e.g. "Grey Gym Sock as nominee for Blue Gym Sock" the financial institutions have instructions to ignore the nominee and report the beneficiary, and generally they would have already checked out Blue Gym Sock as part of their efforts to not get involved in money laundering and terrorist financing.

Of course, if GGS only has his own name in the shareholder register and the 'nomineeship' is just some private letter between him and BGS that was never disclosed to the bank or broker, contrary to their terms and conditions, the bank won't know of BGS's involvement. So all the millions of pounds of financial asset balances and the hundreds of thousands of dividends and interest and capital proceeds would just get reported as being beneficially owned by GGS. Then when GGS is being audited by HMRC and asked why he has been named as owning all those assets, he can fess up or pay the tax You might find he is more reluctant to provide nominee services as time goes on...

Obviously it is not so simple and self-regulating if BGS chooses as his nominee shareholder a middle eastern corporate whose owners don't care how much money is associated with their names because they don't have income tax in their own country. He gets to hide ownership and pretend the money belongs to someone else, and that 'someone else' doesn't have any tax consequences because nobody ever asks them to pay tax.

However, he has a practical problem when they as the company's legal owners decide to disregard their letter about providing nominee services, and do whatever they like with the company, taking its assets for themselves because they are the ones named on the shareholder register. So, BGS has to use his millions that he doesn't practically control to raise a private army and get on over to that part of the world to ask nicely for the return of control of his investment structure.

Basically once you start to get into the murky world of wealthy people using people in obscure non first-world jurisdictions to hide stuff for them, you are never going to catch everyone, but at least the result - forcing people to deal with very dodgy people to hide their wealth - is some sort of a deterrent. Or as you say, getting to the point where people have to break laws to be secretive, is better than people being casually secretive.

"the press to go on fishing expeditions" - yes, that's part of why i want as much as possible on public record. to assist with investigations of powerful corporations and individuals.

Creating and maintaining the public records is hard work and expensive and a removal of privacy.

So if the goal of it is so that the Daily Mail or the Sun can go picking through lists of ownership and come up with some half baked story about how somebody connected to somebody was banging somebody's wife on a luxury yacht which was beneficially owned by somebody, or so that some ambulance chaser can surf through the lists and start cold calling the person at the top about selling them yacht insurance, I'm not in favour.

Obviously in the nirvana of 'ideal world' this would only be used by journalists and media and commercial organisations for 'good' reasons though, right? In practice, it wouldn't, which is why moving everyone's private personal and business affairs into the public domain isn't going to happen.

for instance, it was being pointed out recently that scottish limited partnerships can be used to obscure ownership (and hence to evade/avoid tax).

Scottish limited partnerships have separate legal personality. But for tax purposes are tax transparent (i.e. look through to the owners to pay tax rather than the SLP itself).

However, the members of a UK (including scottish) limited partnership are filed at companies house. And if there is a transfer of partnership interest in a UK (including scottish) limited partnership, it has to be advertised in the London or Edinburgh Gazette to be lawfully effective.

Reforms to the limited partnership legislation are underway.

But looking globally, yes all sorts of vehicles can be used and abused to avoid tax or obscure ownership. That's the problem with having hundreds of years worth of laws created by hundreds of countries. You are not going to reverse them all during the term of Trump's presidency or other arbitrary deadline.

and the UK is more generally a popular jurisdiction for people looking for secrecy. the UK's companies house does pretty much nothing about companies not following the rules, except striking them off the register after a while. (because they have minimal resources for enforcement.)

The UK is a terrible jurisdiction if you are looking for secrecy. You would be better using somewhere where the equivalent of companies house does not have such an advanced system of law and does not keep so much stuff freely available on public record.

The reason loads of people use UK is because it is a global financial centre with well established rule of law. It's not perfect so improvements are (broadly) welcome. At least, they would be welcomed by some. They are not practically welcomed by anyone who has to spend time, effort and money improving them, or anyone who has a company or partnership or trust or whatnot and needs to invest time, effort and cost to follow newer and more complex rules for minimal gain to themselves.

so info about large beneficial holdings will be required, which is a very positive step. but compliance may effectively be on the "honour system".

Compliance is always an honor system because you can always lie and make stuff up, to a point, and if you are wealthy enough to have billions 'hidden' offshore you can afford layers of bribes and a private army to protect it. The people with the hundreds of millions or billions of pounds to embezzle will surely have wealth in excess of the operating budgets of many of the towns and cities or national tax authorities of lots of people, so it is hard to beat them in a fair fight.

my overall point is that it is worth keeping up pressure on governments (including the UK), to make this stuff more effective.

Makes sense. Like everything, there are some easy wins and then it gets more complex and expensive for minimal practical improvement, and it can only possibly work if you get all world government to be enthusiastic about it rather than be reluctant participants.

The point of my original post was that there is lots of stuff going on that the average person doesn't realise or comprehend when he hears a headline that someone has an overseas bank account or investment fund, or is told that the government has done nothing and continues to do nothing about international tax evasion, offshore assets, profit shifting etc etc and that we are all worse off as a consequence. The media is full of this nonsense.

wiltshiregirl69

dunstonh wrote: »

They are real. We have several clients with over a million on ISAs.

yes...one of them is my father - the problem being that if you are a determined lifetime saver - you can't get out of the habit and he now has (or rather me and my sibling will do) regarding inheritance tax liability. Once a saver - always a saver. Still investing the full ISA allowance each year - out of his pension !! - in his 80's. ISA's and peps certainly encouraged people to save - but discourages spending out of them somehow. Lots of inheritance tax payable on the deaths of these hardened savers I would suspect.

dunstonh

the problem being that if you are a determined lifetime saver - you can't get out of the habit and he now has (or rather me and my sibling will do) regarding inheritance tax liability.

He has the ability to mitigate it. Gifting and placing the investments into trust are two ways.

Still investing the full ISA allowance each year - out of his pension !! - in his 80's.

Maybe gift the siblings the money instead. Gifts from income are exempt from IHT.

ISA's and peps certainly encouraged people to save - but discourages spending out of them somehow.

Be proud of him and hope that some of it has worn off on you.

wiltshiregirl69

dunstonh wrote: »

He has the ability to mitigate it. Gifting and placing the investments into trust are two ways.



Maybe gift the siblings the money instead. Gifts from income are exempt from IHT.



Be proud of him and hope that some of it has worn off on you.

Not sure leaving the earth with over £1million in savings is a thing to be proud of - is that a life well lived?
He will not take professional advice on anything but is attempting to give bits away to us. Trying this tack and he is doing something but no enough by a long way. Feels rather money grabbing to have the conversation but I have done. It would involve him cashing in a full set of isa shares to bring him down to the £650k iht limit and he is so used to investing and saving in an isa it's difficult for him to stock pick those to sell.

bigadaj

wiltshiregirl69 wrote: »

Not sure leaving the earth with over £1million in savings is a thing to be proud of - is that a life well lived?

Arguably better than leaving £1 million in debt though soem would disagree.

I don't think it's particularly relevant to a life well lived. If that is all then probably not but he's presumably added to people's lives through friends and family, work relationships, local community, maybe charity etc, which are far better measures than a balance sheet.

My father is similar but he won't change, all you can do is explain things and reason with logic but with no prospect of success. Any payment of inheritance tax should go towards government services and is only paid when significant assets are involved in any case.

grey_gym_sock

bowlhead99 wrote: »

So if the goal of it is so that the Daily Mail or the Sun can go picking through lists of ownership and come up with some half baked story about how somebody connected to somebody was banging somebody's wife on a luxury yacht which was beneficially owned by somebody, or so that some ambulance chaser can surf through the lists and start cold calling the person at the top about selling them yacht insurance, I'm not in favour.

Obviously in the nirvana of 'ideal world' this would only be used by journalists and media and commercial organisations for 'good' reasons though, right? In practice, it wouldn't, which is why moving everyone's private personal and business affairs into the public domain isn't going to happen.

i wouldn't go so far as to say everybody's financial records should be completely public. though i believe in sweden everybody's tax returns are public, which may seem a bit extreme to us, but apparently the sky doesn't fall in. perhaps this stuff just becomes less interesting when it's all public? but i wouldn't suggest going that far ...

i think when somebody runs a business in the UK, or owns land here, it is reasonable to insist on the beneficial owner being disclosed. perhaps for yachts, too.

where i'd sometimes like more protection for privacy is in reporting about who's banging whom, or other personal (as opposed to financial) things. with the exception of cases where somebody either holds public office or has campaigned on some public issue and where their private behaviour is incompatible with their public role or reveals hypocrisy in the public stance they've taken.

Scottish limited partnerships have separate legal personality. But for tax purposes are tax transparent (i.e. look through to the owners to pay tax rather than the SLP itself).

However, the members of a UK (including scottish) limited partnership are filed at companies house. And if there is a transfer of partnership interest in a UK (including scottish) limited partnership, it has to be advertised in the London or Edinburgh Gazette to be lawfully effective.

Reforms to the limited partnership legislation are underway.

the issue AIUI is that, if none of the members of a scottish limited partnership are UK resident, then the partnership is not taxable in the UK and doesn't even have to file accounts. also, the new rules about disclosure of large beneficial owners of UK companies don't apply to SLPs.

this is presumably accidental (i think SLPs have been around for longer than UK LLPs?). but there were some reports that SLPs were now being promoted outside the UK precisely for purposes of tax avoidance/evasion.

But looking globally, yes all sorts of vehicles can be used and abused to avoid tax or obscure ownership. That's the problem with having hundreds of years worth of laws created by hundreds of countries. You are not going to reverse them all during the term of Trump's presidency or other arbitrary deadline.

The UK is a terrible jurisdiction if you are looking for secrecy. You would be better using somewhere where the equivalent of companies house does not have such an advanced system of law and does not keep so much stuff freely available on public record.

The reason loads of people use UK is because it is a global financial centre with well established rule of law. It's not perfect so improvements are (broadly) welcome. At least, they would be welcomed by some. They are not practically welcomed by anyone who has to spend time, effort and money improving them, or anyone who has a company or partnership or trust or whatnot and needs to invest time, effort and cost to follow newer and more complex rules for minimal gain to themselves.

as you've mentioned, people looking for secrecy generally have to make a trade-off between better secrecy and a more reliable legal system (where their assets are not likely to be stolen by some intermediary). there are some jurisdictions with strong secrecy but weak legal protections, others with better legal protections but less strong secrecy.

the UK is clearly nearer the end of the spectrum of jurisdictions with stronger legal protection and weaker secrecy. but it is a jurisdiction which is very attractive to some people who want secrecy. the city of london is a major - perhaps the major - world centre of money laundering, is it not?

Compliance is always an honor system because you can always lie and make stuff up, to a point, and if you are wealthy enough to have billions 'hidden' offshore you can afford layers of bribes and a private army to protect it. The people with the hundreds of millions or billions of pounds to embezzle will surely have wealth in excess of the operating budgets of many of the towns and cities or national tax authorities of lots of people, so it is hard to beat them in a fair fight.

Makes sense. Like everything, there are some easy wins and then it gets more complex and expensive for minimal practical improvement, and it can only possibly work if you get all world government to be enthusiastic about it rather than be reluctant participants.

well, there are 2 broad approaches to dealing with non-compliant jurisdictions:

1) ban, or heavily restrict, financial transactions with those jurisdictions. this might be an option for some of the tiny secrecy jurisdictions, if they don't keep up with the changes expected. but not so plausible for delaware, for instance.

2) insist on full disclosure of the ownership/control of businesses operating in (for instance) the UK, and of assets located in the UK. if there is non-compliance, then seize and sell off the UK assets, and the beneficial owner has to come forward if they want to receive the proceeds of the sale.

The point of my original post was that there is lots of stuff going on that the average person doesn't realise or comprehend when he hears a headline that someone has an overseas bank account or investment fund, or is told that the government has done nothing and continues to do nothing about international tax evasion, offshore assets, profit shifting etc etc and that we are all worse off as a consequence. The media is full of this nonsense.

well, i'm hardly going to defend the media on this - most of it is owned by tax-cheating billionaires

i am going to defend the perception of the general public that many big companies and rich individuals are cheating on their tax (to clarify: i'm using "tax cheating" as a technical term, which includes both "tax evasion" and "tax avoidance"), and that the government isn't doing enough about it. the actions of recent governments suggest to me that they are trying to look like they're doing something about tax cheating while actually leaving enough loopholes open that it continues.

it is early days for may/hammond, but so far they have been resisting the obvious positive step of putting country-by-country reporting on public record. they voted down 1 backbench amendment (backed by all members of the public accounts committee - from all political parties) which would have done this. they've since accepted a different amendment, which merely gives the government the power to make CBCR public - but doesn't force to them to.

under cameron/osborne, we had the farce of 2 allegedly major anti-avoidance measures - the anti-abuse rule, and the diverted profits tax (a.k.a. the "google tax") - both of which turn out not to apply to anybody at all. the "google tax" apparently doesn't apply to google - hilarious! (the anti-abuse rule might have had some effect if they hadn't designed it in a way that made it almost impossible to use.)

and in case this seems a party-political, things weren't better under blair/brown. what has changed since then is that there is more public awareness of tax abuse, and hence more demand for the government to act.