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In this episode we explore Amazon’s tax challenge:
Annual shareholder’s meetings used to be pretty staid and boring affairs. But, as inequality has boomed along with corporate profits, AGMs are becoming sites of protest. In this episode, Taxcast host Naomi Fowler speaks to Katie Hepworth of PIRC and Jason Ward of CICTAR about the recent challenge to Amazon on tax transparency from shareholders. How did the challenge unfold and what was the result? What does it tell us about progress on principles that are increasingly important to us as societies?
By popular demand a transcript is available here (some is automated)
The original post of the podcast is here and the Taxcast website is here.
"Amazon is just a perfect example of how the global tax system is utterly broken and in need of a massive overhaul. It’s a form of madness to be giving large government contracts to multinationals that don’t pay their taxes, it seems that that’s a very common sense provision that all governments at every level should be looking at.”
Jason Ward, CICTAR
"Is transparent tax reporting inevitable? I think it is, I think where we’re at with tax reporting is where climate reporting was 10 years ago. And if we look at the history of climate reporting then we can see the importance of actually starting to target individual companies over tax disclosure and the way shareholder proposals at individual companies about their climate disclosure snowballed into regulatory reform for mandatory disclosure. The vote puts other companies on notice that investors expect greater transparency.”
Katie Hepworth, PIRC
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