Having spent decades working for the Australian Taxation Office, the Customs department and in private accounting firms, Martin Feil has a true insider’s insight into the murky world of multinationals and their accounting practices. This book was written before the release of the Panama papers, however Feil mentions in the preface that these documents exposed tax evasion and avoidance by wealthy individuals and his book is about the tax minimisation strategies of multinational corporations which he argues is a far greater problem.

One of the main tactics used by corporations is called ‘transfer pricing’, a mechanism that allows parent companies (who have little responsibility to pay tax anywhere as they are ‘multinational’) to overcharge their subsidiaries (who do have an obligation to pay tax in the country in which they’re operating) for goods and services in order to minimise their profits on paper and therefore reduce their tax bill. Feil calls this the ‘global multinational crisis’ (GMC) and he asserts it is having far more destructive consequences than the global financial crisis.

This is such an important topic but one that can be difficult for the lay reader to engage with. I would have liked more anecdotes, Feil’s writing comes alive when he turns to personal anecdote and I wanted more of these. I would have also liked more devil’s advocate arguments, Feil puts everything down to greed and I think many would argue that it’s more complicated than that. Having said that, the Australian focus of this book is a great help for relating to some of the more difficult economic concepts, and Feil also explores our trading history and lays out some solutions for the future. Ultimately Feil concludes that corporate tax is a social justice issue and ‘transfer pricing has become the global monster that threatens the social fabric of the entire world’. Scary stuff, but writing a book that shines a light on this hidden world is certainly a step in the right direction.

Kara Nicholson