Corporate tax avoidance is estimated to cost governments around the world US$240 billion annually in foregone revenues (OECD, 2015). In the post-crisis global economy many governments face ongoing budgetary challenges exacerbated by weak economic growth. In response many have implemented austerity measures aimed at reducing government expenditure, often through limiting social services. This has inspired a campaign led by vocal tax justice activists calling for companies to ‘pay their fair share’ of the tax burden. The contemporary campaign against corporate tax avoidance, however, is just the latest iteration of a long running attempt by global civil society to draw attention to unfairness and inequity in the global corporate tax system. As early as the 1970s civil society organisations such as Oxfam and Citizens Against Tax Justice were campaigning against aggressive corporate tax planning. However, for much of the last century this advocacy went largely unnoticed. This paper argues that the key impetus for change in this field was the onset of the Financial Crisis and the emergence of social movements critical of capitalism, neoliberal economics and the inequalities these systems produced. Social movements such as UK Uncut and Occupy played a key role in giving the anti-tax avoidance campaign the traction it required, elevating the issue in the minds of the public and forcing governments to act. This chapter traces the role of civil society in elevating the issue of corporate tax avoidance from a closed, technical discourse controlled by tax practitioners and economists, to a mainstream political issue. Using analysis of media coverage of this issue in the period since the early 1980s it is shown that despite the concerted earlier efforts of groups as diverse as Oxfam, the Tax Justice Network and the OECD, the ultimate driver of the campaign’s relevance was the Financial Crisis and the ensuing challenges to global tax governance, including the distribution of the tax burden.
