I recently finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a truly brilliant novel about the ascent of Thomas Cromwell to political and legal power in Tudor England. There is something of the intrigue and drama of that in Confidence Games: Lawyers, Accountants, and the Tax Shelter Industry by Tanina Rostain and Milton C. Regan. The book is a detailed investigation of a series of abusive tax shelters in the US between 1994 and 2004 whereby Rostain and Regan say, ‘law firms, accounting firms, and financial institutions involved in the shelter industry… perpetrated fraud not only on the government but also on their own clients.’
Rostain and Regan set out the role of a number of factors in the scandals: profit per partner metrics (e.g. one firm took a too good to be true partner into their fold for the income he extracted out tax schemes through ‘value billing’); legal professional privilege (notably, but not solely, its extension to accountants – coming to an ABS near you); confidentiality agreements (clients sometimes had to pay to entering into tax avoidance discussions which were then subject to confidentiality and tax litigation was often compromised on a confidential basis); mis-selling to clients; and so on.
