http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20798067

In a sense he's right, but not in a good way, and trying to imply corporate responsibility is a load of BS when it's more about what you can get away with and what your shareholders expect.

one reason i believe in a flat rate tax system
20% of gross earnings which happens to be about the same as the 20% VAT that has been collected
20% of gross is better the 0% of nothing and is easily enforceable ...

Interesting. I thought it was defined by legislation. Is he publicly stating corporations should get to decide which laws they adhere to and which they don't?

big global companies hold more power then national Govts
by the simply fact that national Govts are limited in there scope to national boundaries
whereby global companies are not and are out of reach of national Govt

in essence national Govt 'globally' are very much like local councils ...

Corporations are the new nations.

Flat taxes are great for the rich and businesses as they can avoid taxes and an even greater share is passed to the average person. The same applies to sales taxes, if you have a really large income you can get by with spending a little and investing it where you pay very little tax. Over the last thirty years the tax burden has fallen ever more on the average person. Yet are suckered into giving the rich even more tax cuts through changes like flat taxes.

as stated above 20% on gross is better then 20% of nothing
its a matter of choices

the people who work and pay by PAYE will always suffer a heavier tax burden
unless a flat rate tax system is available and viable for all ...

It's down to arbitrage - the ability to take advantage of differences between multiple markets. Traditionally, for instance, hedge funds have made a lot of money by simply borrowing in a country with very low interest rates (Japan) and lending in one with much higher rates (everywhere else) then they pocket the difference between the two rates. In doing so all they are really doing is moving a cost from one country to another.

Multinationals, quite legally (on the whole), utilise tax arbitrage, based on the completely different taxation systems and rates that apply in the countries in which they operate. The techniques may be obscure, but the basic idea of moving costs around the world is for accounting purposes not much different to moving goods around the world (which is also arbitrage).

If every country just keeps doing its own whack-a-mole piecemeal thing to spike the system so that they gain on one one hand and lose on the other (which every single country does), then the benefits of arbitrage will remain so high that not to utilise it would be commercial suicide. So yes, with absolutely no law breaking at all, companies do in large measure get to choose how much tax to pay, and only those with no competition can afford to take the moral high road. Therefore the solution (as is usually the case with dubious ways of making money) is to remove the benefits of arbitrage rather than to waste energy frowning at those who benefit from it.

If countries were to converge on roughly similar levels of corporation and capital gains taxes (the former being a trend already observable, the other a pipe dream), then the benefits of arbitrage for most multinationals would disappear in a puff of smoke (ok, more stuff than that would have to harmonise, but you get the idea). But a lot of countries would have to come together in some at least semi-formal arrangement for that to be possible.

Politically of course, that would require that actors as widely divergent as the President of France and the United States Congress would somehow have to agree on a treaty of some sort that would bind the whole of the developed world to the same minimum levels of corporation tax and maximum levels of subsidies and tax breaks. The reality is that we live in a world that is incapable of setting aside import tariffs for raw beef, so Martin Sorrell is going to remain correct for the foreseeable future.

You still miss the point that even a flat tax amounts to a tax cut for the rich, and so a transfer of the burden on the average person. The only way to ease that burden is to cap the allowances but as we saw from the fuss being made about the cap on charitable donations that is unlikely as well. There will be those who use charitable donations as a way of cutting their tax bill. The fairest regime is one where income is taxed progressively which is why all advanced economies use it. The collection of taxes via consumption also amount to a tax cut for the rich.

The problem is the complexity - the more complexity you add the greater the number of possible loop holes you create. Its only the well off that can then afford to accountants to find and exploit them

One advantage of a flat tax system is that there are no loop holes
All income (wages, interest, shares, rent etc) is taxed at one rate. There is then no incentive to try and "fiddle" then system by paying yourself say £1 wage and a dividend from your company of £1M.

I actually do think that having the same rates for all income and gains is the correct way to go. The problem is would people accept the ending of the tax free status on homes? Another problem is that MP's probably have capital gains and the additional allowances of tax free gains, which if you merged all the allowances into one then they would easily pay a minimum of £2000 extra tax and as much as £4500 simply on the loss of that additional capital gains allowance. Since the bulk of the problems in our economy are down to speculation with borrowed money hitting capital gains will actually hit those that created the problem, and raise much needed funds for fixing the deficit.