Quite a few British lawmakers announced following the hearing that they would work to change British law. A fascinating research paper by the Knesset showed that there are several countries that have actually gone backwards (backwards, in my opinion, of course) in this matter.
In the US, it turns out, there was already complete transparency of tax assessments in the 19th century. Individuals, as well as companies. You could know everything and newspapers would publish pages upon pages with the material. In the 20th century it was a bit hip and in 1976 it ended.
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Australia and Japan also decided to stop publishing tax assessments, after it became too yellow for their liking.
This is an interesting discussion (I'm on the side of the Scandinavian countries, of course, where it has been customary for decades to publish all the names of ordinary people and large companies, usually also on the Internet. Is it a coincidence that those countries usually appear in the tables of the least corrupt countries in the world?), but that's not my complaint.
In Israel, we don't discuss whether to publish all income and tax reports or not. Here we have a particularly strict level of secrecy. It is not even allowed to know that the tax authorities are conducting proceedings against the largest corporations in Israel and the most powerful people.
If the Tax Authority is demanding 4 billion shekels from tycoon Benny Steinmetz, then you are not allowed to know why, how, and how much. Since you will not know, then even the Tax Authority officials can compromise whenever they want and for whatever they want. The judges can drag out the hearing forever. You won't know.
This is not an invention, it is reality.
The Tax Authority sued Teva, Check Point, and other companies and brought evidence of alleged improper behavior by those companies, but none of you have heard of it (unless, of course, you saw Itay Rom's excellent article in Makor).
If one of you were to slap someone on the street, the case would be published and forever remain on Google. But if a huge corporation is evading taxes in inappropriate ways - you shouldn't know.
In Israel, for some reason, there isn't even a world war over this. Not long ago, President Grunis overturned a great and important ruling that required the Tax Authority, following a petition by 'Globes,' to at least publish the tax benefits of the largest companies in the economy.
Judge Michal Agmon-Gonen wrote a brilliant ruling on freedom of information and transparency and ordered the Tax Authority to transmit the information and transmit it quickly, while the public debate is still relevant.
President Grunis, unfortunately, overturned the ruling, and more so on primarily procedural grounds (the judge, Grunis ruled, did not have the jurisdiction to hear the petition). This controversial ruling also passed under the radar.
Somehow, the SRP is at the center of the conversation (what do you know, after a year of waiting for Yael German to study the system, the committee report is now being published), a debate about gas exports has everyone in the audience, but this law, which is one of the sharpest expressions of capital-rule that one can think of and the way in which the government protects capital, no one is talking about it (almost no one. Shelly Yachimovich proposed something, but abandoned it pretty quickly).
From Raviv Drucker's website: http://drucker10.net/?p=2230
