With the new Star Wars
movie due out later this year, no doubt our screens will soon be full of Star
Wars related merchandising.
The idiosyncratic way
Yoda speaks, which has remained amusing for 35 years, has been used to great
effect by many. But please don't try it when taking about CBCR. That way peril
lies!!
You see, the position
of one word can be so important.
So, for example, I
might express my:
"public support for country-by-country
reporting."
A very slight Yodification
gives you:
"support for public country-by-country
reporting."
The former is support
for the OECD model of CBCR, shared only with tax authorities. This is the current proposal supported by the UK government.
The latter is the
publication of CBCR data in the public domain. This is what the European Parliament recently voted to support, and is what many NGOs are calling for.
These are fundamentally
different positions variously taken by businesses, NGOs, the OECD, the European
Parliament, UK government etc.
Rarely does such a
subtle change in word order encompass both sides of such a heated debate.
So beware. Firstly,
don't let Yoda respond to questions on CBCR. And secondly, when reading about
someone's view on CBCR, be sure to look at what word order chosen they have.
Hi Tim,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this amusing piece. I am probably one of the last people on earth who hasn't seen the Star Wars films in full, but I can see your point.
To make this word play work however, a little confusion crept in, in my view. This relates to the matter of 'public support.' Public support is a phrase used normally to indicate a democratic majority, obtained either by means of a referendum (for example in 2005 there was public support to block the EU constitution in The Netherlands and France) or by parliamentary majority (for example: the Dutch parliament voted in majority for a resolution calling for publicly disclosed country-by-country reports).
In your: "I might express my "public support for country-by-country reporting"," I take that to mean that you as a person endorse the idea of reporting on a country-level basis by transnational enterprises. When you later refer to the bit between inverted comma's to be the OECD position, it may seem to some readers that that option has 'public support', i.e. a democratic mandate.
I would attribute that value more to what you call the Yodificated version, namely:
In the sense that there is public "support for public country-by-country reporting." So a double-public there. This is indeed based on the large majority in the EP (the last instance where this issue came up - in the shareholders' rights directive - the ratio was roughly 4 to 1), and on several national votes (including the above-mentioned).
You are right if you say that some governments prefer the OECD's 'confidential' system, and one might want to ask why. One way of looking at this is that public country by country reporting would indeed increase the possibilities for the public to scrutinize the fiscal behaviour of multinationals, but that it would at the same time enable them to assess the effectiveness/effects of a governments' tax policy. Perhaps it's this increased accountability that governments face that is what makes some governments prefer a 'confidential' system.
What would Yoda's take be on this?