Financial Transparency Coalition

Real estate is often the choice conduit for money launderers to transfer money, primarily because it can be difficult to misprice, but also because of the way some countries write their laws.

For many developing countries, natural resource wealth offers a potential way out of persistant poverty. There are few places in the world where this is as true as Niger, a landlocked country with a per-capita GDP of just US$400. The country has substantial mining exports and potential oil reserves, but an opaque financial system empowers a corrupt and increasingly autocratic regime, and little wealth from natural resources has reached the people on the ground. Niger ranks 186th out of 187 countries on the UN Human Development Index.

In 2010 Congress enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which aims to combat tax evasion by U.S. citizens holding investments in offshore accounts. Under this law, the IRS and the U.S. Department of the Treasury require U.S. taxpayers holding financial assets on foreign soil to report those assets. FATCA also requires foreign financial institutions to report certain information about U.S. taxpayers directly to the IRS. The Treasury planned to phase in the law’s requirements in several stages. Starting in 2013, the IRS would require participating banks to conduct due diligence for identifying new and pre-existingU.S. accounts and...

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released long-awaited guidance on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement. The FCPA prohibits U.S. multinationals from bribing foreign officials in almost all cases. It is considered the keystone anti-bribery law in the world, and has been vigorously enforced over the past decade by the U.S. Department of Justice, after a spotty record of enforcement since its 1977 passage.