‘We were keen to be part of it’: Watch the Fair Tax Mark’s National Business Standard launch in full

The Fair Tax Foundation have launched a new standard with which to certify businesses around the world with the Fair Tax Mark.

The National Business Standard was released during Fair Tax Week 2026. It opens the Fair Tax Mark up to a wider group of responsible businesses worldwide. Businesses operating in a single country anywhere in the world are now eligible for certification.

To launch the new standard, the Fair Tax Foundation held a live webinar in Fair Tax Week during which Head of Accreditation Jaime Boswell outlined how the standard works, what it assesses and why.

Watch the full webinar here.

The standard covers four main areas: general transparency, tax policy, governance and compliance, tax note disclosures (or tax transparency), and tax contributions.

“For number one, we’re looking for a full set of financial statements in the public domain, as well as details on beneficial ownership,” Boswell said.

“Number two is a clear public tax policy with highly responsible tax commitments, such as following the spirit as well as the letter of the law.

“Number three and number four are combined: if you’re paying taxes, fantastic, great, that’s amazing. But there are many reasons why a business would not be paying headline rates of taxes. For example, they might have made a few losses in previous years, and they can carry forward those losses and offset it against current year profits. Therefore, the tax rate for that year would be slightly lower. They might have invested heavily in planting machinery and capital, and therefore be allowed to claim accelerated tax depreciation, which is in the spirit of the law. Obviously, that’s why it was designed that way, and that would impact tax rates.

“The caveat is it must be explained in a clear way. In a way that non-accountants and non-tax professionals would actually understand.”

Boswell added these accounts have a wide range of stakeholders. As well as tax and accounting professionals, those can be consumers, shareholders and other stakeholders. So a clearly explained narrative is key.

Tripseed are first business certified under new standard

Also speaking during the webinar was Ewan Cluckie, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Tripseed, a destination management company based in Chiang Mai in Thailand.

Tripseed were the first company in the world to be awarded the Fair Tax Mark under the new National Business Standard.

“The obvious question is why would a travel company care this much about tax?,” Cluckie said.

“Tripseed was really founded on one core idea, and that’s that tourism should leave more behind in the places it touches than what it takes out.

“We measure how much of every trip stays in the local economy. We choose our suppliers on that basis. The whole business is organised around local economic retention and the quality of the money that is retained.”

Over the past three years, Tripseed have been trying to measure that. They began by building their own economic transparency framework – the Economic Distribution Disclosure Initiative – as a way to track how much of each trip’s value genuinely stays in the destination.

“Corporate income tax is one of the few parts of this picture that can be evidenced,” Cluckie explained. “It’s filed, it can be scrutinised, it can be independently assessed.”

Watch the full webinar here.

When Tripseed first reached out to the Fair Tax Foundation, there was no standard available by which to assess the company. So they went ahead independently last year and published their inaugural tax disclosure referencing the GRI 207 standard.

“It was only when we got back in touch with the Fair Tax Foundation that we learned a new global national standard was in development and we were extremely keen to be part of it.

“Adapting our existing GRI 207 disclosure from last year with the latest data and to meet the new Fair Tax Mark standard turned out to be a remarkably straightforward process because Jamie and the Fair Tax Foundation team really guided us through it.

“They gave us a full points-based scorecard showing exactly where we could strengthen our data, what we needed to improve, any elements we were missing that we could add in to really meet the standards that is expected of fair tax accredited businesses.”

Fair Tax Mark benefits to business

Cluckie added the benefits of the Fair Tax Mark go beyond being the right thing to do: they also apply to doing business.

The first business benefit is trust: “A verified independent mark on tax conduct is something [our partners] can point to with confidence,” Cluckie said.

The second is differentiation. “In a crowded market, anyone can claim to be responsible, and many do. Very few can show an externally verified position on tax. It sets us apart in exactly the conversations where it counts.”

The third is internal. “It’s one more thing that lines up with who we actually are as a business.”

Tax is gaining interest again

Giving insight into the wider tax transparency and ESG landscape on the webinar was Francois Marlier, senior manager in the ESG tax practice at KPMG Acor Tax.

He said the new Fair Tax Mark standard had arrived at an interesting time for corporate tax transparency.

“After what I think is close to a decade of strong growth in the number of transparent corporate taxpayers and in the quality of such transparency, it recently felt, to me at least, as if we’d reached a bit of a plateau.

“Many of those companies who either intrinsically wish to be transparent about the tax affairs or had faced demands from investors to do so, had by now achieved a level of maturity they were comfortable with.”

There was also regulation to grapple with – such as the EU Green Deal for European sustainability teams, and the pushback against ESG that had been gaining momentum.

But with regulation continuing to elevate transparency, and seemingly more media scrutiny on aggressive tax planning, he said the interest was once again coming back to tax and good governance.

Take a look at the National Business Standard.

“This brings me to another reason why I find this standard both valuable and timely,” Marlier said.

“Beyond the information that tax reporting provides on whether or not companies pay the right amount of tax in the right place at the right time, responsible tax management is essentially about good governance, accountability and business conduct.

“I personally see bad tax management and aggressive tax planning, and resistance to tax and financial transparency as indicators of a corporate culture that risks enabling business misconduct in general.”

He added that an over-reliance on low tax rates can indicate an inability to adapt to change in regulatory environments.

“So [the standard is] a useful tool for investors and other stakeholders for due diligence purposes.”