Financial Transparency Coalition

Anyone looking for great reading on illicit financial flows today should go to the Tax Justice Network blog. All of these blogs deserve a good read:

• Deepwater Horizon: Twice offshore (again)
• Ferrari chairman ranks tax evasion as top problem …
• Hillary Clinton: tax and inequality key developmen…
• Tax wars: Swiss radio investigates
• It’s a topsy-turvy world: KPMG tops corporate resp…
• A new list of secrecy jurisdictions, from Brazil

The G20 finance minister’s communiqué says:

We expressed the importance we place in achieving a single set of high quality, global accounting standards and urged the International Accounting Standards Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board to redouble their efforts to that end. We encouraged the International Accounting Standards Board to further improve involvement of stakeholders.

This is, of course, totally appropriate. Stakeholders are probably the biggest users of accounts. And they come in a wide variety of forms – as I have documented in this briefing sheet. More importantly,...

When in Norway earlier this week I was asked what the benefits of country-by-country reporting are. It was a good question. It deserved a full answer. As a result a new briefing sheet on his issue has been published today. It’s available here. Comments are welcome. The benefits are summarised in this table:

Data to be disclosed under country-by-country reporting

Information need met

There’s another new briefing sheet out, published today, on financial transparency. It’s available for download here and says: Introduction Transparency is at the core of the demand for tax justice. But what is it? What do campaigners mean when they say they want increased transparency? This paper seeks to provide a concise answer to that question, but each dimension of transparency, noted below, will be the subject of an additional briefing sheet to provide greater detail on just what it might mean in practice. The 11 steps to financial transparency Tax justice cannot happen by...