Multinational tax planning

Much multinational tax planning is a legitimate response to tax incentives and it can be difficult to know where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. There are some areas where the current international tax regime could be updated to reflect the modern way of doing business but the basic transfer pricing model based on the arm’s length test is still likely to be the fairest approach going forward.

Slaughter and May recently announced a new scheme to improve fitness levels amongst staff. We were each given a pedometer and told that if for a week we managed to walk 10 000 steps each working day we would be rewarded with a bag of jelly babies.

On Monday I used the stairs rather than the lift and went to see as many...