Financial Transparency Coalition

Jesse Drucker at Bloomberg is on form again. This time, it's a startler: Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion U.S. Revenue Lost to Tax Loopholes. (Note: TJN just wrote about Martin Sullivan explaining how Microsoft has shielded billions from U.S. taxation.) In each case, it is this trick of transfer pricing (or mispricing) being used to shift profits around the world, in order that profits are realised in the low-tax or zero-tax jurisdictions, while the losses are shifted to the "onshore" higher tax countries, where they can be heaped (in the form...

The French Catholic newspaper La Croix has published a remarkable graph showing how far opinions have changed recently in France, with respect to the causes of hunger and poverty in developing countries. In September 2010 they asked 985 people aged 18 and over to ask for their opinions about various issues with respect to poverty. Click the graph to enlarge it (and click on the article to see more results).

The Tax Justice Network is delighted to announce the creation of a new section on the TJN website, Special Features. This will be a very occasional series of feature articles, involving high quality research and journalism, which will complement our more academic Briefing Papers section, and other technical output that we have been publishing over recent years. For our inaugural special feature we are extremely grateful to William Brittain-Catlin, a corporate investigator and author of “Offshore: the dark side of the global economy.” This is an interview with Caroline Doggart (pictured), an...

The "low-tax nations" in this headline isn't generally referring to tax havens, (or secrecy jurisdictions, as we like to call them.) It is aiming at a different kind of low-tax nation, and it poses a question raised by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said last month:

This is one of my pet peeves: Countries that will not tax their elites but expect us to come in and help them serve their people are just not going to get the kind of help from us that they have been getting . . . Pakistan cannot have a...