Over Here and Undertaxed: Multinationals, Tax Avoidance and You

Tax: inevitable for you, optional for Starbucks? Tax expert and blogger Richard Murphy explores how and why multinational companies in the UK are allowed to legally avoid corporation tax while debt rises and public services are cut - and what needs to be done about it.

Richard Murphy is a UK chartered accountant. He was senior partner of a practicing firm and director of a number of entrepreneurial companies before becoming one of the founders of the Tax Justice Network in 2003. He now directs Tax Research UK and writes, broadcasts and blogs extensively. 
 
Richard created the country-by-country reporting concept for multinational companies and has been credited with creating much of the debate on tax gaps in the UK and Europe. He also defined the term ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, now widely used in debates on offshore taxation. He has been described as the architect of 'Corbynomics' as part of the Corbyn campaign for leadership of the labour party. 
 
Richard is joint author of Tax Havens, The True Story of Globalisation and sole author of The Courageous State. In 2015 he became Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London.

Tax has rocketed to the top of the news agenda. When Amazon, Google and Starbucks were pulled up in front of the Public Accounts Committee, many were stunned at how little corporation tax they paid (if at all) in a time of austerity and government cuts. How can a tax gap of £12 billion be justified, when a CEO can take home $101 million a year? There is a growing realization that maybe we aren't ‘all in this together’, and what are Google's 'Dutch sandwich' and a 'double Irish' anyway? 
 
 In this 30,000-word ebook Richard Murphy, a highly respected economic commentator and blogger, explains how we came to this situation, its origins and development after the 2008 economic crisis, who the villains of the piece are, and why. But this ebook also seeks answers and Murphy offers concrete and practical solutions in the face of growing public awareness, which politicians and companies will ignore at their peril as taxpayers vote with their feet. 
 
 Part of the Brain Shots series, the pre-eminent source for high quality, short-form non-fiction.

Richard Murphy

He has done the impossible: writing a book on tax that is not the literary equivalent of a handful of sleeping pills... A brief but critically important book. It needs to be read by politicians and journalists as a matter of urgency

Richard Murphy is a rare voice of sanity at a time of economic madness. We desperately need an alternative to austerity - and with a few more Murphys, we'll get it.

Conventional economists have run out of ideas. But Richard Murphy abounds with them. He writes with electric clarity about what went wrong and what could be done to put things right. He is a new economic thinker, and guided by a sharp and practical accountant's eye he knows where the money is hidden, who has it and how to release it. Murphy is is as courageous as he says our politicians should be.

'A brief but crucially important book' 
Marcus Chown 
 
In The Joy of Tax, tax campaigner Richard Murphy challenges almost every idea you have about tax. For him, tax is fundamentally about the ideas that shape the sort of society we want to live in, not technicalities. His intention is to demonstrate that there is indeed a joy in tax, and by embracing it we can create a fairer society and change the world for the better. 
 
Tax has been a feature of human society for a very long time. Almost no one gives tax a good press even though, as Richard Murphy argues, it has been fundamental to the development of democracy the world over. Whilst we may not like tax very much, in contrast it is clear that we really do like the public services which governments provide. So much so, in fact, that for most of the last 300 years, people have been more than happy for governments to run deficits by spending more than they raise in taxation. 
 
 2008 apparently changed all that. The issues of debt, deficits, cuts and austerity have dominated the political agenda ever since. Virtually every aspect of the government's finances and how to rearrange them in the forlorn hope of balancing the books has been discussed in great detail. Despite that, there has been almost no real discussion during this period about what tax is for and how it contributes to the creation of the society we aspire to.

Richard Murphy

Praise for The Joy of Tax

He has done the impossible: writing a book on tax that is not the literary equivalent of a handful of sleeping pills... A brief but critically important book. It needs to be read by politicians and journalists as a ...

Richard Murphy is a rare voice of sanity at a time of economic madness. We desperately need an alternative to austerity - and with a few more Murphys, we'll get it.

Conventional economists have run out of ideas. But Richard Murphy abounds with them. He writes with electric clarity about what went wrong and what could be done to put things right. He is a new economic thinker, an ...

He has done the impossible: writing a book on tax that is not the literary equivalent of a handful of sleeping pills... A brief but critically important book. It needs to be read by politicians and journalists as a ...

Richard Murphy is a rare voice of sanity at a time of economic madness. We desperately need an alternative to austerity - and with a few more Murphys, we'll get it.

Conventional economists have run out of ideas. But Richard Murphy abounds with them. He writes with electric clarity about what went wrong and what could be done to put things right. He is a new economic thinker, an ...

He has done the impossible: writing a book on tax that is not the literary equivalent of a handful of sleeping pills... A brief but critically important book. It needs to be read by politicians and journalists as a ...

Richard Murphy is a rare voice of sanity at a time of economic madness. We desperately need an alternative to austerity - and with a few more Murphys, we'll get it.

Conventional economists have run out of ideas. But Richard Murphy abounds with them. He writes with electric clarity about what went wrong and what could be done to put things right. He is a new economic thinker, an ...

Books by Richard Murphy

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