Financial Transparency Coalition

David McNair, senior economic justice advisor at Christian Aid and a contributor to this blog, wrote a fantastic essay for politics.co.uk today, in which he highlights the disastrous ramifications posed by tax havens for developing countries and calls for the adoption of country-by-country reporting standards and automatic exchange of tax information. McNair specifically notes that transfer mispricing alone (an illicit technique used by multinational corporations to evade paying taxes) costs developing countries $160 billion per year according to Christian Aid research. Indeed, the problem is likely even larger than this as Global Financial Integrity has published...

In its statement to the G20 this weekend, Oxfam International highlighted the need to crack down on tax havens as a development and human rights imperative. From Oxfam:

Reforming tax havens alone could release $160bn, reallocating an already agreed IMF bailout could free up another $89bn, and introducing a currency transaction tax could raise at least a further $30bn – each a significant sum to help poor people suffering in the crisis.

The money is desperately needed to prevent the crisis derailing efforts to reduce poverty as developing countries suffer job...