Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

World Service,23 Feb 2013,28 mins

Tax and the multi-nationals

In the Balance

Available for over a year

This week the programme goes in search of fairness from the corporate world. You might imagine that could be a wild goose chase, but our search comes down to a very straightforward question: do multi-national companies pay enough tax? With a bit of clever accounting many of the biggest can get away with paying very little indeed. Some people believe the answer is that they should pay nothing at all, others believe they have a duty to pay a great deal more. Everyone seems to agree that something has to change. Our presenter, Jamie Robertson, is joined by Pascal Saint-Amans who heads up the Centre for Tax Policy at the OECD in Paris; Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute in Washington DC, and in London Melanie Ward from the UK based international development agency Action Aid. Plus our resident comedian, Colm O'Regan, imagines a host of different taxes on human behaviour.

Programme Website
More episodes