Maya Forstater

The big ask of the FTM is voluntary country-by-country reporting -- which is easy to comply with if you only operate in 1 or 2 countries. So in practice (I think) only one UK firm w international operations (LUSH) has done it so far.

FTM have not yet developed a template for foreign owned companies. But underlying assumptions are that transparency provides anyone with enough data they can use to judge if company is paying a fair amount of tax.

Which clearly isn’t the case for AMT Coffee. The transparency seems to come down to “trust us”.

i'm really sceptical of private initiatives & voluntary codes of conduct for businesses. i've never seen this improve outcomes - for labour, environment (& perhaps tax too?) isn't this a distraction from need for effective government legislation & international cooperation?

This is I think the only such initiative on tax. I don’t have much knowledge of similar initiatives in other areas - is it something that’s been studied?

YEAH! enough literature to fill a castle! the forest stewardship council is pretty similar: http://www.fsc-uk.org/en-uk  lots of parallel initiatives in global supply chains.

And if, hypothetically, I was incredibly lazy and already had a reading list with 72 papers on it, how would you summarise the complex literature in 140 characters?

Auditors claim to provide independent assurance But struggle to see what's going on inside So report management processes & systems (not the stuff that matters). None of this tackles the incentives driving non-compliance (in labour/environ) So abuses persist.