Financial Transparency Coalition

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the United States is one of the primary research arms of the federal government. It publishes reports, often at the request of Congress, to help answer questions related to important policy. Congressed asked the GAO to evaluate the IRS's effort to clamp down on offshore tax evasion, and the GAO responded with a surprisingly insightful report.

Joshua Keating posted some excellent information over at Foreign Policy today: Research from Niels Johannesen of the University of Copenhagen and Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics looks at the result ofinternational agreements taken to prevent tax evasion in the wake of the global financial crisis. The results are not very encouraging for reformers:

Every year, multinational corporations avoid billions of dollars in taxes globally by using abusive profit shifting to move revenue to tax havens and costs to jurisdictions where they actually do business. This is called transfer pricing, and is the biggest problem that the Task Force's Country-by-Country Reporting recommendation is designed to fix, by forcing publish exposure of where firms are reporting their figures. We're Not Broke, the documentary released last year on corporate tax avoidance and the movement to change it, is now available in segments on Youtube. And unlike our previous post on We're Not Broke, the segments are...

ICIJ's investigation last week into the world of secrecy in tax havens is a voluminous, detailed, entirely worthwhile read. There are literally dozens of unique stories that you can sift through, including this weekend's fantastic summary in the Washington Post of the investigation. The damage from offshore secrecy comes far and wide, from billionaires like Bernie Madoff using offshore tax havens to facilitate Ponzi schemes to couples trying to unable to locate assets following a divorce.