Why tax havens should not necessarily be dismissed as bad

Aged 80 next year, Neal is getting worried he will never live to see Scottish independence, a cause he has supported since it grew up into a viable one. For professional reasons he has been based in London lately, but he often travels back home to consult people whose judgment he respects for its insights or (in my case) its quirkiness. Unhappily for him, the coronavirus has put a stop to these movements for a year or n even keener reader of The National than he was before.

Now he writes to tell me he enjoyed my column last week. It introduced to readers Sir Nick Macpherson, another fellow-countryman (and Etonian to boot) who reached the zenith of a career in Whitehall as permanent secretary to HM Treasury. There he foiled Alex Salmond’s scheme for a common currency between a free Scotland and a continuing UK.

Now Macpherson tells us this was not because he is against common currencies as such but because this would have been a bad example of one. To underline the point, he has just joined the team of international experts put together by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to re-examine the toughest problems of the Scottish independence project over the next decade.

READ MORE: Recession is likely due to Boris Johnson's reckless indifference

Is this a clue to how long she really believes it will all take? Is this, then, her answer to the clamour from her critics inside her own party that the whole business must be hurried up? We have, in any case, to find new answers to the difficulties that defeated us in 2014. Sturgeon insists they should be not only new answers but also convincing ones. And maybe we ought to wait till 2031 to make sure we get them. Otherwise, a second defeat in a Scottish referendum would be disastrous, perhaps terminal for nationalism.

I was glad to find Neal’s answers to these questions came near my own, but for the rest of his email he sought out my view of a closely related (though less important) matter – what to do about tax evasion. Since the Second World War, in this country and others, the tax burden has grown because the range and the depth of government have grown. All parties nowadays come to power on promises of the answers to a long list of demands for ministerial action that have brought them to electoral victory. This only encourages different individuals and groups and interests to demand more when in fact they are going to get less.

The ends may be infinite but the means are finite. Fierce arguments about who is going to pay the resulting tax bill follow. Support for noble purposes tends to wilt as more and more of us find out what they are going to cost. Before 1939, only a minority of the population paid direct taxes. Nowadays, almost everybody does, and even some who live off benefits must from time to time also hand some taxes back.

One by-product of this situation has been the emergence of the tax haven. Rich citizens put their money in a bank or other institution in the many foreign countries that welcome it. These do not charge tax on the deposit and might not even enquire how much money is being deposited. There is then no way the details can be found out by the depositor’s own original tax authority, and any income from the investment comes tax free.

To titillate those who like to disapprove of what I write, let me confess I once operated in this way myself. I found a job in Belgium, where I lived for three years and was paid locally. I had hardly arrived when I got a visit from a fat and jolly Flemish accountant with a surefire method of making my acquaintance: “You wanna pay a lotta tax or a leedle tax?” he chortled.

IT was all quite legal, but by the end of my tour of duty my tax bill had not even reached four figures. I might, of course, have shooed the accountant away with self-righteous ire at the corruption he was tempting me to.

Yet I had to think not only of myself. All my expat colleagues followed the same flimflam. They would hardly welcome my breaking their innocent ranks. I had to work with them in any event, so this would only be making life harder for myself.

Besides, what did I owe the Belgian state, whose services I never used? Why should I pay for a Belgian pension I would not get? Indeed, what did I owe the British state, the main alternative recipient, since I was not sure of ever going home again? I deposited my money with an offshore bank in the Channel Islands. And its task was to preserve the value of what it got from me and many other workers. It had at heart an equitable and useful purpose.

Tax havens and tax shelters have existed since the modern global economy formed. They were a function of the fact that talented individuals became able to live and work in different parts of the world, where their expertise contributed directly to economic development. Yet their proceeds from these activities were often hard to protect, and people might lose fortunes as fast as they could make them.

​READ MORE: Why building a better Scotland is not a project for a single party

I really cannot see it as morally indefensible to do whatever was necessary to safeguard their success. Pop stars and footballers do it nowadays too, so it’s not just a matter of bourgeois privilege. Historically, it all has good Scottish precedents, in the beneficial financial institutions founded by Scots to foster development right round Africa and Asia (the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank being the biggest to survive).

It was not as if they had all to be crooks or sharks or shysters either. Most money from financial institutions goes into pension funds, so that in effect the investment of a younger generation finances the consumption of an older one.

Because this is a private industry, there is internal pressure to increase the yield of the capital, that is, to keep the payouts high in relation to the contributions.

Research in 2018 by the International Monetary Fund showed that much of the foreign direct investment coming from tax havens into countries with higher tax had really originated from countries with higher tax anyway.

In the UK especially, the biggest source of such investment was actually from inside the UK itself, yet going by way of tax havens. Financial executives looked for places to park their funds and often chose these institutions.

Then they could afford to wait some more while they sought out the best long-term investment – for most, this was again in their own country, even after more searching scrutiny. It is something good for the UK, and for Scotland especially, as a place with a concentration of financial expertise.

My friend Neal says “like me you might think they are an enemy of prosperity, not just a tollgate on the free passage of wealth but nests of bloody highwaymen”.

Actually I don’t agree. Here we see the capitalist system at its best, completely independent of government but working for the good of all and doing it well.