The Cayman islands, famed for being a haven for tax exiles and a jurisdiction which imposes minimal transparency requirements on foreign businesses, has scrapped an income tax which it was planning to levy on expatriate workers.
The Associated Press reports:
[Premier McKeeva] Bush announced in late July that he planned to impose a direct tax on expatriate workers’ income Sept. 1 to bail the territorial government out of a financial hole and to meet Britain’s demand that Cayman diversify its sources of revenue beyond the work permit fees, duties and other fees it now relies on.He later said the annual income threshold would be $36,000, which would have affected about 5,870 expatriates. He described it as a “community enhancement fee” rather than a tax.
The proposal outraged many people, who said the tax would be discriminatory and could destroy the islands’ main economic anchor.
The tax is, of course, problematic; imposing a special fee just on expatriate workers is a prima facie unjust thing to do. But it is somewhat surprising that Cayman residents have been quite so vehemently opposed to what is, after all, a relatively normal thing to experience in other countries.
It’s almost as though they moved there for the express purpose of avoiding tax. Almost.
Scrapping the tax now leaves the Islands with a black hole in their finances, which the other ~48,000 residents of Cayman will struggle to pay off. But there could be a silver lining to that, as accountant and tax campaigner Richard Murphy writes:
The idea that local democracy could actually bring tax havens down is, however, one that I do find rather appealing. There would be a sense of justice in it if it were to happen, and the more local people suffer in places like Cayman and Jersey for the abuse being administered from their shores the moper likely that is to happen.
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