Richard Brooks (journalist)


Richard Brooks is a British tax inspector and investigative journalist. He writes principally for Private Eye, is the author of books on accountancy and tax avoidance, and was a 16-year senior corporate tax inspector HMRC. He is the joint winner of two Paul Foot Awards, an annual award for investigative or campaigning journalism.

Career

Brooks worked as a HM Revenue and Customs tax inspector for 16 years up until 2005 specialising in international and corporate taxation.
Since 2005, he has been a regular contributor to Private Eye. In 2008 Brooks was joint-winner of the Paul Foot Award for his investigation into the privatisation of the CDC Group. He is the author of The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business and the co-author of Plundering the Public Sector: How New Labour are letting consultants run off with £70 billion of our money. With Andrew Bousfield, he was joint-winner again of the Paul Foot Award in 2014 for their investigations in Private Eye on bribery inShady Arabia and the Desert Fix. In 2018 Brooks published a new book, Bean Counters: The Triumph of Accountants and how they broke Capitalism.