Elusive Profits

The remarkable manoeuvres  by which Apple has avoided a great deal of tax are said to go back to 1991. If it has taken 25 years to deal with such an extreme case, it seems likely that more modest strategies of evasion go undetected altogether.

There is a case for basing tax on something less elusive than so called 'profit', the value of which depends greatly on the skill of accountants.

If a little more money were squeezed out of less easily manipulated taxes such as business rates, value added tax, tax on dividends, and employers' National Insurance Contributions we shouldn't need to worry about profits.