Financial Transparency Coalition

Last year Itai Grinberg, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in the U.S., published an important paper entitled Beyond FATCA: An Evolutionary Moment for the International Tax System, providing a comprehensive overview of the emerging international architecture of financial transparency, with different models of information exchange (see below) jostling for supremacy.

Two key moments stand out for me last week. On Monday I saw former Senator Lugar (R-IN) receiveTransparency International USA’s “Integrity Award” for his work to combat corruption, whether through his oversight hearings of World Bank projects or his leadership on the Dodd-Frank Act, specifically the Cardin-Lugar oil, gas and mining payment disclosure provision. . During a dinner co-sponsored by Exxon, Senator Lugar recounted his lobby visits from oil company representatives during the consideration of this legislation that now requires oil, gas and mining companies to disclose their payments to host governments. After hearing them out, Lugar and his...

The U.S. government is not unfamiliar with short-sighted policies, indeed short-sightedness in political systems often seems often more familiar than not. Yet of all the short-sighted policies the United States has engaged in, and especially of those overseas, the recent reports on ghost money in Afghanistan take the cake. I wish I could say I was surprised. According to a report by the New York Times, the Central Intelligence Agency has literally been dropping off “bags of cash” at Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s office for decades. Karzai called the amounts “small,” but evidence indicates the amounts are anything but—perhaps totaling tens...

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.