This week's opinion

Judith Freedman’s CTA address )raised important issues about how in a democratic society citizens can trust HMRC to carry out its job effectively efficiently and impartially. She cited the row over the Google tax settlement as a classic example of what happens when HMRC’s performance is questioned. The department has taken great strides in the governance of complex tax disputes and I have confidence in the robustness of those processes. But the public demands more. I understand this but I wonder how that insatiable curiosity could ever be satisfied. Even if HMRC were to open the tax files of multinational companies to the editors of the national press and those papers were to report a clean bill of health I suspect that there would still be dark mutterings that the press had gone soft or were all part of a vast conspiracy to cover up...