We are being encouraged to blog, tweet etc the event so set your twitter search, alerting services or whatever to monitor the tag #meetbing

One resource that immediately sprang to mind was the Historical Directories at http://www.historicaldirectories.org/. This is a digital library, maintained by the University of Leicester, of local and trade directories for England and Wales, from 1750 to 1919. It does not attempt to publish every directory available between 1750 and 1919 but what they do have makes fascinating reading.

I first reviewed it in July 2004 and my initial interest was on the business side as I am sometimes asked how to find information on small, local companies going back 50 to 100 years. I quickly discovered, though, that for my own location (Caversham in Berkshire) the Kelly’s directories for 1914 and 1915 included residential listings. I ended up spending hours researching who had lived in my house, who the neighbours had been and their occupations.

There are several search options including a keywords option that lets you search by any combination of location, decade, key name (directory name e.g. Kelly), your own keywords, and with fuzzy logic on or off (off is the default). For my own searches I found it easier to identify directories in my location and then search them individually, but one of the alternative search options may suit you better. For Berkshire I found Kelly’s, Slater’s and Webster’s directories and there is a “Post Office”  directory for Berkshire, Northamptonshire,  Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Huntingdonshire for 1854!

For each directory there is a Fact File containing bibliographic information and links to the main chapter headings. When you view the pages that match your search criteria your search terms are highlighted.

The site also supports seriously advanced search options (see http://www.historicaldirectories.org/hd/howto/howto7.asp#detailed for details). For a phrase just type in the words next to one another, for example Star Road. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a person their name may appear as surname, middle name(s), first name. For this type of search there is a “within” operator, for example George w/3 Bloggs will look for George within three words of Bloggs in any order. The wildcard is a question mark (?) and replaces a single character. The asterisk replaces 0 or more characters. Wildcards can be used at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word.

For information on who was hitting the headlines in your town in the 1890s you could try the recently launched British Newspapers 1800-1900 at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/. This covers two million pages of 49 local and national 19th century newspapers. There is a basic search option on the home page but the advanced search enable you to search by keyword, publication date(s), place of publication, section (e.g. people, business), publication frequency and language (English or Welsh).

The problems start with the publications that are covered – only 49. Nothing in Berkshire so this is a non-starter for my own local search. Note also that you have to pay to view most of the articles. A 24 hour pass costs £6.99 and allows you to view up to 100 articles. A seven day pass costs £9.99 and gives you 200 article views.

I could not find out what the buzz was in Reading and Caverhsam in the 1800s from the British Library newspaper archive  (perhaps there wasn’t any!),  but what do the directories have to say? According to the 1854 Post Office directory:

“BERKSHIRE, sometimes called Barkshire, and for shortness Berks or Barks, is a southern inland shire, on the south or left bank of the navigable Thames, which forms its northern boundmark, and in the valley of which it lies, approaching within twenty miles of London, and in the middle between the mouth of the Thames at the North Sea and the Bristol Channel. The shire is of very irregular shape…”

And who did live in my house in 1914/1915? Number 88 Star Road, or number 6 Webb’s Cottages as it then was, was home to Charles Herbert and his wife Mary who was a shopkeeper. Neighbours included a wheelwright, carpenter, window cleaner, builder, two pub landlords and an insurance agent. Apart from the wheelwright, not very different from today’s residents!

Phil Bradley has already reviewed Bing and I agree entirely with everything he has said.  The home page is reminiscent of the old Ask home page that allowed you to “skin” the page with an image. I like the snow leopard that is on the UK version but if I should get bored with it, I can’t change it.

My test web searches came up with results that were mostly identical with those from Live.com. For some of them, for example my search on car ownership UK, Bing puts a fact or a statistic at the top of the page. In this case it came up with 510 cars per 1000 people, a statistic apparently from the International Road Federation but 2004 data! The Advanced Search is as pathetic as ever, but you can use search commands such as ‘filetype: ‘ and ’site:’ in the standard search box.

The image search is virtually the same as Live’s with minor changes to the layout.  The Shopping option takes UK users to Ciao.co.uk (very confusing), News is as useless as before, and Maps takes you to Multimap. Much more interesting is the Google-type maps option at http://maps.live.com/ or http://maps.bing.com/ but you cannot find that by following the menu options. You have to know and enter the URL directly into your browser.

At present, all Microsoft seem to have done is put a slightly different interface on top of Live and given it a different domain name, an impression further reinforced by the help files still being on live.com. I will continue to use Live.com as one of my favourite alternative search engines: it does sometimes come up with unique content and I like the image search. Bing has nothing that is significantly new or innovative. As Phil Bradley says, what a wasted opportunity. Google can rest easy.

There is also a two page “Getting started with Twitter” document. Yes, I know that there is a plethora of  how-to-twitter pages on the web but almost none of them answer the questions that I am asked on my workshops. The best and most succinct that I have found so far is the two page http://portfolio.ginaminks.com/job_aides/twitter_cheat_sheet.pdf

Venue: Great Expectations, 33 London St, Reading

Date & Time: Tuesday 2nd June 2009. 1800 for 1830 hrs

Business Resources at Slough Library

Lisa Hodgkins will provide details of the information resources available for business at the Slough Library. Slough Libraries continue to provide a high level of service in this area.

Followed by free refreshments and networking opportunities with colleagues.

An invitation is extended to anyone with a professional interest in the topic

Contact: Please contact Norman Briggs nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk if you wish to attend.

“Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen Wolfram, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, A New Kind Of Science. The service bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” which is a mouthful. I’d call it a “fact search engine” or perhaps an “answer search engine,” a term that’s been used in the past for services designed to provide you with direct answers, rather than point you at pages that in turn may hold those answers.”

From Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” http://searchengineland.com/wolfram-alpha-fact-engine-18431

If you are interested in the background and aims of WolframAlpha the article in Searchengineland.com goes into more detail.

I am not going to go into any more background here, enlightening and informative though it is, because the average punter will not bother and will simply type in a query. This is where the trouble starts. You have to understand that WolframAlpha deals with data and statistics, but only certain types of data. If you are looking for market share data, forget it. My test search on gin vodka sales UK came up with what was to be the all too common:

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

Half a dozen searches later it found an answer for one of my test queries – world oil production. The answer was correct but horrendously out of date: an estimate for 2004. The same search in Google came up with figures for 2008 and estimates for 2009.

It managed to the find the population of the UK but when I asked it for the population of Caversham it decided that I really meant Faversham. Google wins again on this one.

This morning’s tweets #wolframalpha suggested that it is very good at comparing country data. It provided some very basic data when I looked at UK and France but adding a third (Germany) caused it to totally lose the plot. Some data was labelled with the country but for the rest I was left guessing.

As WolframAlpha has a scientific bias I tried it on Planck’s constant, which it got right (but then so does Google in big bold letters at the top of the results list). Spinach vitamin C was another winner, but trying to compare it with mango and broccoli was more of a challenge. If you type in spinach mango broccoli Vitamin C, WolframAlpha only looks for vitamin C in broccoli. You have to type in ’spinach and mango and broccoli vitamin C’. It came up with a table for vitamin C levels for all three but there is only one nutritional facts table and it is not labelled.

I then decided to see if could come up with information on the origin of petroleum. Another fail as it tried to look for the origin of  the word petroleum.

How about zeolites then? No it asked me if I meant websites.

Next stop companies, which WolframAlpha suggests it can handle. It provided limited share price data on Royal Dutch Shell and even managed to compare it with BP and Tullow Oil. The information is rather spartan and you would be far better off going to Yahoo Finance or Google Finance for information on listed companies. WolframAlpha failed totally when I added in Heritage Oil. Was a fourth company too much? I did a separate search on Heritage Oil and it simply did not recognise the company.

Now, come on – Heritage Oil is on the London Stock exchange, which is where I thought WoframAlpha was getting its data (or so the labelling implied) but that may not be the case. When you look at the Source Information it says

“This list is intended as a guide to sources of further information. The inclusion of an item on this list does not necessarily mean that its content was used as the basis for any specific WolframAlpha result.

For me, this is a major issue. I need to know where the information has come from and a list of  possible sources is not good enough.

It is still very early days for WolframAlpha, so it may eventually live up to expectations. It has long way to go and there are major problems to address:

1. The types of query that it can handle are limited and this needs to be made more obvious to the average searcher

2. The way you phrase your search is important. For some of my test searches I had to try four or five variations before it came up with any results. The average searcher will give up after the first attempt and go back to Google.

3. Some of the information is seriously out of date.

4. Sources are not directly linked to the data. It is essential that one knows where the information has come from.

I shall go back on a regular basis to see how it is progressing but for the present I am sticking with my existing favourite  sources for serious research.

For those of you who not yet made a submission for the 2009 Online Conference, the deadline has now been extended to Friday 8th May.

We have already received a good number of interesting speaking proposals from around the world, but we still want to hear from you.

We want to hear from organisations that have transformed themselves to be more agile and flexible by exploiting open linked data and conversation streams.  We are looking for exciting, innovative applications as well as lessons learned from Twittering and mash-ups.  We want to show case organisations that are using semantic web techniques to create new and exciting resources. And what about managing the chaos of agile development and “always beta” deployments?  Have you learned how to guarantee privacy and security in this heady but chaotic world?

Do you have a story to tell?

- Maybe you’ve been involved in creating a new application for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo or Google?

- Have you made the move to the semantic web to deal with the digital explosion and the need for greater “intelligence” in your information?

- Perhaps you’ve found ways to exploit new Online tools to transform the way your organisation does its business?

- Have you changed your management processes to cope with this “always connected world”?

Then why not share it with others?

Whether you work in business, libraries, academia or the public sector, good ideas are invariably transferable and we need to hear them.  The Online world is waiting to learn from the pioneers who have made it work.

This is your chance to be seen as one of the leaders – with your story reaching a global audience from over 40 countries.

For information on conference themes, making your submission, review criteria please click on the links in the box below.

We look forward to receiving your proposal.

Online Information Conference Committee 2009

It consists mostly of screen shots so it probably won’t make much sense on its own. You’ll have to come to the meeting!

They have reintroduced the Questions and Answers section but to be honest Google gives results for searches formatted as questions that are as good as, if not better, than Ask’s. And as for the Question of the Day on the home page… I really do not want to know which celebrities are pregnant.

Ask claims that Jeeves is back by popular demand but, like Phil Bradley, it looks to me like a pathetic attempt to win back users.  I fear that they are doomed to failure unless they radically improve their search results.

Date: Tuesday 5th May 18.00 for 18.30 (postponed from February)

Presenter: Karen Blakeman

Venue: Great Expectations, 33 London Street, Reading, Berkshire RG1 4PS www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=471801&y=173139&z=0&ar=Y

Please advise Norman Briggs, BBOD Events Co-Ordinator Tel: 0118 987 1115 or nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk
or Chrissy Allott, BBOD Chair Chrissy.Allott@berkshire.nhs.uk if you plan to attend

Seminar details

Mashups – tasty recipes for 2009

Mashups are not just for the remnants of your Christmas or Sunday dinner! A mashup is also a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool, and you may be surprised at how commonplace they have become. Blogs, Yahoo Finance, Facebook, Geograph, and the latest UK police forces’ crime statistics all use mashups.

Karen Blakeman will look at examples from a variety of sectors and subject areas and show how easy it is to create your own. The issues of quality and ownership of data will also be addressed.

BBOD meetings are free and open to all with a professional interest in the topic.

Refreshments provided afterwards.

Twitterplan is a new service that has been set up by Lichfield District Council with help from the City of Lincoln Council and Planning Alerts. It sends a Twitter direct message to you whenever a planning application is submitted in your area. Go to http://www.twitterplan.co.uk/ and follow the instructions on screen.

The service covers 324 local authorities at present and there is a list of participants on the Twitterplan web site. My own council – Reading Borough Council – are included, which surprised me. Reading BC do not seem to be that keen to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and their web site can be a nightmare to navigate. They may be in the list, I thought, but will they actually deliver? A few hours after I had signed up my first two DMs arrived!

I am impressed: click on the link and you are taken direct to the details on the authority’s web site. It beats having to carry out an advanced Google site search on the Reading BC web site and trawling through the local newspaper planning applications.

First install the  Greasemonkey plugin then install “Twitter Search results on Google” script.  Run a search in Google and the script will display the 5 most recent tweets above the Google results.

1. Site search

This one crops up again and again, but so many people have not yet discovered how powerful this command can be. Use the advanced site and domain search to limit your search to just one web site or a type of organisation (e.g. UK government, US academic). It is ideal for searching individual web sites which have diabolical navigation or appalling site search engines, and for searching for types of information, for example site:ac.uk for UK academic research papers on a particular topic. Use the advanced search screen in Google and Yahoo, or the ’site:’ command as part of your search strategy in the standard search box on Google, Yahoo, Live.com and MSE360.com. For example:

carbon emissions trading site:ac.uk

If you are searching for PowerPoints or PDFs, use both Google and Yahoo. Google indexes the first 101 K of a document whereas Yahoo indexes the first 500 K so the results can be significantly different when it comes to larger files.

2. Filetype search
There are lots of goodies to be found on the advanced search screens of Google and Yahoo. Think about the type of information you are looking for and focus your search by file format. For example statistics and research data are often left in spreadsheet format (xls). If you are looking for an expert on a subject limit your search to PowerPoint (ppt, and also pdf as many presentations are converted into this format before being loaded onto the web).  Industry, market and government reports are often in PDF format.  Yahoo and Google have the more common file formats in a drop menu on their advanced search screens.  If  the one you want is not listed use the filetype: command followed by the file extension as part of your strategy in Google, Live.com and MSE360.com. In Yahoo, use ‘originurlextension: ”

3. TripleMe
http://www.tripleme.com/
Enter your search and TripleMe displays results from Google, Yahoo and Live side by side. The fourth column contains the inevitable ads.

4. Google Finance
http://www.google.co.uk/finance , http://www.google.com/finance
A worthy competitor to Yahoo Finance although it does not have the wide range of stock exchange coverage of Yahoo. It does, though, beat Yahoo when it comes to the share price graphs. The graphs are ‘annotated’ with labels at the appropriate time point and these link to news articles that are listed to the right of the graph. Both offer free, daily historical share prices in figures.

5. PIPL.com and 123 people.com for people search
http://www.pipl.com/ , http://www.123people.com/
As well as web sites, blogs, images and directories PIPL and 123People search social media and networking sites for a person by name.

6. Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/
A service that allows presenters to upload PowerPoint presentations  and make them available in various formats. Ideal if you are looking for information or an expert on a topic, a speaker for an event, or just some ideas for your own presentation.

7. Videos
Use services such as YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) to track down  “how to” videos and news. Also, why not create your own videos to promote your services or business and put them on YouTube?

8. Google CSE
Google Custom Search Engines (Google CSE) at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
Ideal for building collections of sites that you regularly search, to create a searchable subject list, or to offer your users a more focused search option.

9. SCoRe Search Company Reports
http://www.score.ac.uk
A catalogue of current and historic printed company reports held in UK libraries. The catalogue does not provide links to digitised documents but is a very quick and easy way of identifying libraries that hold hard copy reports. The participating libraries include London Business School, the British Library, Manchester Business School, City Business Library, Guildhall Library, Strathclyde University and the University of Warwick. A full list is available at http://www.score.ac.uk/collections.asp.

10. Bureau van Dijk’s (BvD) “A Taste of Mint”
http://mintportal.bvdep.com/
A free directory from BvD giving basic information on companies world-wide. One experienced researcher at an earlier workshop commented: “It found the company I have been looking for when every other directory failed!”

You can search both sections free of charge and it is no surprise that when it comes to viewing reports in the Premium Reports section you have to pay. But you also have to pay if want to view the details of articles in Public Reports and download them. Why pay for articles and reports that you can find free on the web? Because Reportlinker indexes them and enables you to narrow down your search by industry, location and language and that requires human effort – at least I assume that there are real people doing this. Reportlinker seems to concentrate on formatted files such as PDF and DOC and so misses many HTML pages with data that are picked up by Google. I found that one of  my standard searches – gin vodka sales UK  – picked up one useful government document on Reportlinker but failed to retrieve web pages from the UK Gin and Vodka Association that gave me far more up to date information. Looking at alternatives to Google, I found that iSeek also performed better than Reportlinker in both its Web and Educational search on my test searches. See my review of iSeek at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2009/02/24/iseek/

Now to the pricing. There are two rates: a day rate at 39 Euros + 19.6% VAT and a monthly rate at 55 Euros + 19.6% VAT. I first tested the full service with a day rate but then decided to go for a month’s worth as I wanted to demonstrate the service at several workshops and to clients. I skimmed through the terms & conditions and did not register that the monthly subscription was not for just 1 month but a recurring subscription. And there are no refunds when you’ve realised your mistake after spotting the next debit on your monthly credit card statement! Yes you can cancel, but you have paid out for that month and that is it.

I accept the blame for this. I always check the terms and conditions of a subscription and I did manage to find a link to them at the bottom of the subscription page. I did look at them, but obviously not carefully enough. However, at no point in the subscription process is there a box that you have to tick saying that you have read and accepted the terms & conditions with an adjacent link to those T&Cs. By the time you have entered your credit card details it is too late to start wondering where the T&Cs are.

In conclusion, I am not impressed with Reportlinker. If you are a total novice in searching for business information, it may come up with some good reports but you can do a lot better by using the advanced search features of the standard search engines. On top of that, the monthly subscription option is not clearly worded and the T&Cs not explicitly offered to you for acceptance on the payment page. The best I can say about that is “sneaky”, the worst – well, perhaps best not to say what I really think.

“We worked hard to find Furl a home where loyal users like you could continue to benefit from best-of-breed social bookmarking and annotation tools. Hands down, Diigo.com was the winner due to its innovative approach to online research tools and knowledge sharing.

The Diigo team is dedicated to making sure you continue to get top notch features and service. They’ve got a crack team of technologists who love making research and knowledge sharing as easy and efficient as possible.”

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Despite having a vastly superior range of features to Del.icio.us it has never managed to match the latter’s publicity. It has always remained in the backwaters of social boomarking, being used mostly by researchers who need to annotate their bookmarks, download or back up files, or archive copies of pages they have referred to in reports. The last is what had appealed to many of my clients. One of the problems with using information from free web pages – even on government sites – is that the content can change within minutes of you having completed your analysis and report. The client may then come back and point out the the cited page does not have the data you claim, or even worse, has disappeared. Furl allowed you to archive a copy of the page as it was when you visited it.  I must confess that I was always uneasy about this part of the service as I suspected that in some cases it would be a breach of copyright, but the alternative is to either use the Wayback Machine (not reliable) or keep a local copy with something like Scrapbook for Firefox.

I don’t use online bookmarking services. I travel extensively and am often in situations where the wi-fi is unreliable or non-existent, so I prefer to have as much of my reference material available offline as is possible. Many of my clients do make extensive use of  them, though,  so I have tested several over the past couple of years – Del.icio.us, Furl, Connotea, 2Collab. Of them all I found Furl to be the most useful for what I call  “serious” business resource management.

On Furl this morning there are options to transfer to Diigo. I decided to test it out and went for the the new user option but was told that my email address for the login had “already been taken”. The fact that I had forgotten trying Diigo is worrying; I was obviously so unimpressed the first time around that I did not record the details. I assumed that I had used my default password for testing new services and it worked. Diigo is now busy importing  my Furl files.

I only hope that Diigo has improved since my last unmemorable visit and that it will combine the best of both services to provide an even better one. But, as we all know, online life’s not like that.

The sites are broken down into the following categories:

• Local Government
• Central Government
• Health
• Police & Fire
• LG Related
• Social Media

Once you have run your search, you can select which types of sites you want to appear by selecting the appropriate category link.

Further background information is on Dave Briggs’s blog at LGSearch update.

“Jersey is to join other Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories as a signatory to a Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) with the UK. TIEAs play a vital role in HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) drive against offshore avoidance and evasion.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, the Rt. Hon Stephen Timms MP said:

“Exchange of information and transparency between countries and territories is vital in combating tax avoidance and evasion. Jersey’s decision to embrace this principle is very welcome and a crucial step in the right direction.

“More countries and territories must now follow Jersey’s example. In coming weeks we will be working with G20 partners to boost global co-operation to address tax evasion. I urge those who have not yet met international standards to think again and start work on the necessary reforms immediately”.

HMRC Permanent Secretary for Tax, Dave Hartnett said:

“The importance of this TIEA with Jersey should not be under-estimated. It will enable us to obtain the information we need to ensure that the days when putting assets off shore provided an unfair tax advantage are well and truly over.”

The text of the agreement is available  on the HMRC website at  http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/international/jersey-eol.pdf and will in due course be laid as Schedules to a draft Order in Council for consideration by the House of Commons.

This is the fifth TIEA signed by the UK and follows the OECD Model Agreement on Exchange of Information on Tax Matters. The UK already has a TIEA in place with Bermuda and signed TIEAs with the Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands and Guernsey. Jersey has signed TIEAs with the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the Faroes.

From a business researcher’s point of view, this doesn’t change the problems we have when looking for information on companies registered in Jersey or the other tax havens mentioned in the press release.

The first time I didn’t do this was because a major upgrade was due in a couple of weeks so why go through the hassle of installing minor bug and vulnerability fixes? The answer came as I was demonstrating my blog’s features to a very public workshop. Sniggers from some of the participants indicated that something was awry.

“Do you really recommend those viagra sites listed in your blogroll?”

“Oh s**t!” I thought. It was a good example, though, of the dangers of not keeping your software up to date. It was not a major disaster and quickly sorted. I removed the offending links and upgraded as soon as I made it back to the office. I also swore that I would never let that happen again, but easier said than done.

I have been pretty busy lately and doing a lot of travelling. That sometimes makes it difficult to download and install the Wordpress updates. Version 2.7.1 had been announced but I was up in Glasgow for a couple of days. A couple of days was enough for the hackers to do their work. As soon as an update is announced, Wordpress very kindly tells you and the rest of the world which vulnerabilities the update deals withs. If  the hackers did not know about them before they do now and target blogs usiing the previous version. And they targetted mine!

As a visitor to my blog, you would not have noticed anything unusual because the toe rags managed to add a couple of extra files that added invisible links to the template for my category pages. The first I knew about it was as I was sitting in Glasgow airport waiting to board my flight back home. I checked my email and there was an email from Google saying:

“While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines….. Specifically, we detected hidden text on your site. For example…”

Then they dropped the bombshell:

“In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from rba.co.uk are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days. We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.”

It had only taken the hackers 2 days to identify my blog as using the older, vulnerable version of Wordpress with the result that I was consigned to the Google sin-bin for at least a month.

Once I was back I tracked down and removed the offending files and code – the hackers  had modified the template for my blog category pages – and updated Wordpress. I then changed  my user name and password and did something I should have done months ago: added the new security keys. There are now four of them and they make your site harder to hack and access harder to crack.

Having done all that I toddled off to Google, abjectly apologised and, as they requested on the appeals page, explained what had happened and what I had done to prevent it happening again. Then I sat back, viewed the 30% drop in traffic to my site, and sobbed into my G&T as I contemplated at least another 25 days of the Internet equivalent of being sent to Coventry.

Good news this morning, though. I am back in Google’s index! The security on my blog is now tighter than the proverbial duck’s posterior but I shall make sure that I shall

a) update “as soon as” and whatever it takes

b) install all additional security features that Wordpress recommend
and
c) regularly check my web site and blog for files that weren’t there yesterday.

I might not be so lucky next time.

The article singles out four regions in particular: Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Cayman Islands, Delaware and the City of London.

Switzerland is in the list because of its “banking secrecy laws”, and Liechtenstein is one of three tax havens listed as uncooperative by the OECD. The other two countries are Monaco and Andorra.

The Cayman Islands should come as no surprise, but I am still amazed at how many analysts and researchers keep asking me why they can’t find any financials or detailed information on companies that are registered there. Just take a look at Cayman Islands Companies: Formation & Registration:

“The Registrar of Companies can only release the name and type of company, its date of registration, the address of the registered office and the company’s status. Disclosing any other information is prohibited unless requested by a law enforcement agency.”

The US state of Delaware is another well known “haven”.  The Delaware Division of Corporations refers to its “modern and flexible corporate laws” and “a business-friendly State Government”. Roughly translated it means that you will have a hard job finding accurate, up to date or sometimes any information on companies registered there.  Many of the companies I have looked up on their register don’t give any proper contact details or give fictitious names. But perhaps Homer and Marge Simpson really are directors of multiple businesses in a wide variety of sectors?

The naming and shaming of the City of London came as a surprise, though. The UK is the last place that most of its citizens would regard as a tax haven but the article is referring to the so called “non-dom” laws. A non-dom, or non-domiciled person, is someone who is resident in the UK but claims it is not their home, their  ‘domicile’ being in another country. As a non-dom they pay no UK tax on their overseas earnings unless they bring the proceeds into the UK. UK Chancellor Alistair Darling’s announcement last year on proposed changes to the tax laws for non-doms caused an uproar and there have been many subseuqent “clarifications” and amendments to the proposals. I won’t bore you with the details here but if you are interested go to Chipwrapper and search on non-dom Alistair Darling and select Past Year as the time slice.

For the majority of us, tax havens will remain a dream. Substantial donations to the author of this blog would be gratefully received – used notes in a suitcase preferred