Richard Murphy

Richard Murphy (born 21 March 1958) is a British chartered accountant and political economist who campaigns on issues of tax avoidance and tax evasion.

He advises the Trades Union Congress on economics and taxation, and founded the Tax Justice Network.

He is a Professor of Accounting Practice at University of Sheffield Management School.

Richard Murphy was born in 1958 and brought up in Ipswich.

His undergraduate degree was in Accountancy at the University of Southampton, and further trained at KPMG becoming a Chartered Accountant.

For much of his early career he was an accountant in Downham Market, Norfolk.

In 1985 he co-founded an accountancy firm which became Murphy Deeks Nolan.

The company was sold in 2000.

Murphy was also the founder of a company that became the European distributor for the game Trivial Pursuit.

Murphy has since admitted that the manufacturing operation he set up in Ireland to manufacture Trivial Pursuit was there to avoid UK taxation, something of which he is now ashamed and was a turning point in his career towards anti-tax avoidance campaigning.

Since 2003 Murphy has become more involved in economic and taxation policy issues.

He was a co-founder of the Tax Justice Network.

He is the director of Tax Research LLP.

However, because Tax Research LLP is a Limited Liability Partnership he is technically the designated member rather than a director.

The only other member of Tax Research LLP is Mrs Jacqueline Murphy.

In 2009, Murphy lost a libel claim by Lord Ashcroft and associated businesses where he misunderstood an article posted on an unrelated website and published a blog post claiming that Lord Ashcroft's Belize bank provided "tax evasion services".

In 2021 Murphy was appointed Professor of Accounting Practice at the University of Sheffield Management School.

Previously he had been a Professor of Practice in International Political Economy in the Department of International Politics at City University London.

He had also been a visiting fellow at University of Portsmouth Business School, the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex, and at the Tax Research Institute at the University of Nottingham.

He was the founder of the Fair Tax Mark, but resigned out of unhappiness with a proposal it adopt an international standard.

He is an advocate of Modern Monetary Theory.

He thinks it could be applied to but not essential for a Green New Deal.

Murphy is a promoter of financial reform, with specific emphasis given to tax avoidance and evasion.

He estimates that "£25 billion is lost annually from tax avoidance".

That is substantially larger than HM Revenue and Customs' estimate of £2.7 billion, and his estimate has been dismissed by HMRC.

Murphy claims that HMRC insiders have suggested to him that £300 million additional investment in the department could recoup £8 billion in unpaid tax.

- a broader development of a policy Murphy launched in 2010, called Green Quantitative Easing.

Corbyn also cited Murphy's estimate of there being £120 billion of missing tax revenue as part of the economic plan issued during his election campaign stating that this was enough to "double the NHS budget".

In addition, Corbyn adopted several of the remedies that Murphy has advocated (including country-by-country reporting) to address this revenue gap.

Murphy later clarified that in his view not all of the missing revenue was "recoverable", and that "at best" £20 billion of it could be collected.

His methodology has been criticised by other groups, including the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation in their December 2012 publication The Tax Gap for Corporation Tax, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which cited his estimate of the corporate tax gap for the TUC as one which was "likely overstated (possibly by a wide margin)".

Murphy advocates "country by country reporting", as a means to increase financial transparency to reduce tax avoidance and evasion.

Murphy was named by International Tax Review as the seventh most significant person having influence on tax policy, practice and administration in 2013.

In 2013, the OECD and G8 endorsed a form of country-by-country reporting.

Murphy is in favour of a land value tax, which would tax land based only on its value, and not on the buildings on it, in order to discourage land hoarding and promote building in areas in need of more housing.

It is also very difficult to evade.

He has written in favour of removing high-denomination notes such as the £50 note as they are used widely for tax evasion, saying "there is not a shadow of a doubt that vast amounts of cash" are used for illegal purposes.

In August 2015, many of Murphy's ideas were taken up as proposed policies by Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party leadership election.

Corbyn was elected and became Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition, his economics policies were dubbed "Corbynomics".

This included a policy called People's Quantitative Easing.