The Great Deception claims 100% of all Scottish-headquartered companies’ corporation tax for Scotland. This is demonstrably incorrect.
In 2004-05, the Royal Bank of Scotland paid £2.38 billion corporation tax to the British exchequer. RBS is such a huge company that this was over half of the total non-oil corporation tax for the whole of Scotland!
The Great Deception credits this whole £2.38bn to the Scottish account. But a huge proportion of RBS’s business is outside Scotland (NatWest, Ulster Bank, Direct Line, Coutts etc). If Scotland were to become independent, business units of companies like RBS, HBOS, Standard Life and Abbot Group that are incorporated outside Scotland would pay corporation tax to Scotland only in respect of the small proportions of their operations that were actually within Scotland itself.
The GERS 2004/05 estimate of £2.422bn is therefore a much more reasonable estimate of the non-oil corporation tax revenue than the £4.611bn claimed by The Great Deception. The resulting revenue overestimation amounts to £2.189 billion.
