Standards in tax: the influence of economics and politics on tax policy and tax professionals

It has been encouraging to see the way in which government has obviously placed great faith in HMRC giving it the responsibility to feed money back into the economy through the furlough scheme and various other incentives to keep people working. This has been an interesting use of tax machinery in a slightly different context and it is just one of the ways in which government can use the tax system to achieve its economic aims.

At the same time the European Commission lost its case against Apple on state aid in Ireland (Cases T-778/16 and T-892/16). As a result Ireland is not obliged (subject to any appeal) to ask Apple to pay taxes to Ireland. These were deemed to have been ‘waived’ as an encouragement to make an investment in the...