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You already trust a handful of small symbols. Fairtrade on your coffee and tea, organic on your eggs, the Living Wage badge in a shop window. Each one tells you a business is doing right by someone. For the thing that actually pays for schools, hospitals and roads - tax - there wasn't an equivalent.
So the Fair Tax Foundation, a not-for-profit based in Manchester, UK, created one. The Fair Tax Mark is the first accreditation of its kind in the world: a business opens its books to independent scrutiny, and the Mark certifies that it pays the right amount of tax, in the right place, at the right time.
In this episode I spoke with Paul Monaghan, the Foundation's Chief Executive and co-founder, and Jaime Boswell, its Head of Accreditation, who came to the work from a career advising businesses on how to reduce their tax. We get into why celebrating the companies getting it right may do more than naming the ones that don't; why the familiar picture of tax dodging as a big-corporate problem turns out, in Paul's account, to be only half the story, with much of the UK's tax gap now sitting with small businesses; and what a company's tax really reveals about the kind of organisation, and citizen, it is.
Along the way: what "fair" actually means once you have to audit it, how a decade has changed corporate tax behaviour in the UK and Europe, the companies that come up when the conversation turns to transfer pricing, and why the Foundation is itself a Community Benefit Society, with any surplus locked into its mission.
In this episode
- What the Fair Tax Mark certifies, and how a business is assessed against a published standard
- Why the Foundation celebrates good taxpayers rather than naming and shaming
- How corporate tax behaviour in the UK and Europe has changed over a decade
- Why small-business tax avoidance may be the under-examined half of the story
- The transfer-pricing arrangements that come up around companies like Starbucks and Apple
- Corporation tax as a lever on wealth and inequality
- Certifying businesses beyond the UK for the first time
- Why the Foundation is a community benefit society with an asset lock
About the guests
Paul Monaghan is Chief Executive and co-founder of the Fair Tax Foundation, which launched in 2014; his background is in environmental and governance accreditation schemes. Jaime Boswell is its Head of Accreditation, a former accountant and tax adviser who moved to the Foundation around five to six years ago and, with his team, assesses businesses against the Fair Tax Mark standards.
Links mentioned in this episode
- The Fair Tax Foundation and the Fair Tax Mark (Manchester, England)
- Tripseed (Chiang Mai, Thailand), the first business certified under the Foundation's new National Business Standard and the first Fair Tax Mark business in Thailand
- Friendly Soap (Yorkshire, England)
Chapters
- 00:00 — Introduction: the Fair Tax Mark, and what a company's tax reveals
- 02:07 — How the Fair Tax Foundation began, and crossing over from "the dark side"
- 06:26 — Inside the work: celebrating the good, not chasing the bad
- 09:45 — How tax went mainstream, and where the US diverges
- 16:23 — What the Fair Tax Mark actually certifies
- 22:14 — The barriers to certification, and reaching the rest of the world
- 27:04 — Wealth, billionaires and the case for corporation tax
- 31:01 — Profit-shifting at the top: Starbucks, Apple and the Ireland case
- 33:05 — The other half of the story: small-business evasion and the UK "tax gap"
- 40:50 — What needs to change, and why Paul says we're already winning
- 44:42 — Sanctions, personal liability and organised crime
- 51:32 — Reaching beyond the UK: the first Fair Tax Mark, in Thailand
- 55:58 — Doing right by the community, and the leaders who choose to
- 58:26 — How the Foundation is built: a "commercial not-for-profit"
- 1:00:29 — One thing to take away