Submission to the Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review (Fourth Cycle) for the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, together with its ‘spider’s web’ of jurisdictional dependencies, represents the most financially secretive of all jurisdictions. The UK and its dependents create the vulnerabilities that enable global tax abuse and are indirectly responsible for the concomitant deprivation of human rights and the associated loss of life.
This complicity in secrecy and tax abuse causes immense harm. It exacerbates inequalities within countries and between countries. It has a disproportionately high impact on lower-income countries and upon the most marginalised in those countries. The most recent estimates indicate that corporations are moving $1.2 trillion of profit into tax havens every year, and governments are losing $312 billion to corporate tax avoidance. In addition, governments are losing $171 billion every year due to tax evasion by wealthy individuals. In 2021 the Tax Justice Network reported that the UK and its dependent territories are responsible for one-third of corporate tax abuse and half of the world's tax evasion.
This is a joint submission between the Tax Justice Network and the Government Revenue and Development Estimations (the GRADE) team for the Universal Periodic Review (2022) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The submission details the impact of global tax abuse and the fault lines in domestic policy and legislation that generate continued tax abuse by multinational companies and wealthy individuals. The submission sets out a number of proposals focusing on the need to strengthen the automatic exchange of financial information between jurisdictions, the requirement for publicly accessible registers of beneficial and legal owners, public access to company level country by country reporting data and a reprogramming of the global governance of tax.