Financial Transparency Coalition

A new database of public revenues is now available from the African Economic Outlook, a joint project from the OECD, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the UN Development programme (UNDP.) It is here. It is astonishing that the data on African (and other developing countries') revenue sectors has been so poor, for so long - so it is extremely welcome to see this new source become available, which could become a valuable tool for researchers. The main finding from the data is that African...

From Bruno Gurtner, guest editor. Tax Justice Focus, Volume 6, Number 2 – The SWITZERLAND edition. October 5th, 2010 The Switzerland edition - click here The latest edition of Tax Justice Focus explores the changing face of tax haven Switzerland. Historically one of the world’s most important secrecy jurisdictions, Switzerland – along with its financial services sector – has recently been buffetted by a series of scandals and pressures. These range from a giant tax evasion probe in the United States targetting the Swiss bank UBS, to massive damage to the banks from the ...

A couple of weeks ago we wrote an article here entitled The hidden hands behind tax havens, where we noted that:

Secrecy jurisdictions are not merely an atomised grouping of mostly small states exercising their sovereign rights to set their own tax, secrecy and regulatory rules and laws as they please. Nearly all of the small states are, instead, substantially protected and controlled by larger powers, notably OECD countries, and of these the United Kingdom is by far the most important.

Now we have a new piece...

TJN has written plenty on the subject of how jurisdictions obtain and transmit information between each other for tax purposes. The OECD is pushing its extremely weak “on request” form of information exchange, while TJN and its partners support the far better and stronger alternative, automatic information exchange. TJN now presents a new briefing paper, written by Markus Meinzer, which explores the intricacies of automatic tax information exchange. In order to raise awareness and remedy the apparent lack of information about and understanding of AIE, TJN is starting a precedent case project. Ultimately, its aim is to accompany a...