How to make many millions helping banks avoid tax
Enabling corporations to reduce their tax exposure has become tantamount to squirting shampoo in the eyes of the body politic: it is socially unacceptable and is likely to make you a pariah.
Leading the vilification is UKUncut, an organisation which campaigns against cuts to government spending. It claims those cuts could be avoided if only, 'Rich corporations and individuals' didn't dodge 25bn in tax annually. Last weekend, it organised an invasion of various branches of Barclays.
Even while 'tax mitigation' has joined the pantheon of morally reprehensible career choices, the fact is, lots of people work in the field. And many of them become very rich in the process.
The best known and most wealthy 'tax structurers' have traditionally been located at Barclays Capital. Sitting within its 'Structured Capital Markets' division and now led by Jonathan Zenios, a former accountant, they offer their services both to the bank and to its external clients.
Zenios and his team almost certainly had something to do with the weekend's controversial revelation that BarCap paid just 113m in corporation tax during 2009, despite making a pre-tax profit for the year of 11.6bn.
Very big money for the ethically ambivalent
Why would anyone want to work in tax structuring?
Apart from the thrill of creating an interesting structure which maximises returns to shareholders and minimises payments to governments, the answer appears to be personal reward.
In 2009, the Guardian alleged that BarCap's structured capital markets business was making 1bn in profit a year with a staff of 110 people. The implication was, therefore, that the average individual was generating 9m in profit.
Unsurprisingly, Roger Jenkins, the former head of the structured capital markets business was notorious for earning as much, if not more, than Bob Diamond.
Prerequisites
Nowadays, there are far fewer people working in tax structuring than previously. One headhunter who formerly specialised in the area told us he got out after, "everyone lost their jobs."
However, demand for tax structurers still exists - not least because tax is rising and because banks have racked up substantial tax credits from big losses during the downturn and are now keen to use them efficiently.
RBS, for example, has collected 5.9bn of tax credits, of which 3.7bn relate to the UK. Following enormous losses in 2008, Merrill Lynch will have no need to pay UK corporation tax for several decades.
If you aspire to work in tax structuring, it will help if you have a background from either a law firm or accountancy firm.
"The demand we typically see is for lawyers, chartered accountants or economists," says Jim Halstead at recruitment firm Pro-Tax. "A lot of them are involved in developing financial products that will be tax efficient."
Hence, Robert Russo, who rejoined Ernst and Young as a partner in the financial services tax practice in 2009, started his career at E&Y before going to BarCap, where became a director in the structured capital markets group - before returning to E&Y.
"There's always been that option to move across into banking," says a director in the banking and capital markets team at one accountancy firm. "But they seem to be hiring far fewer people than they used to."
