Financial Transparency Coalition

Tech companies have been racing to acquire as many patents as possible for the better part of the last few years. Last month, Microsoft announced that it had reached a monster deal with AOL, buying 925 patents from Facebook for $1 billion, and then quickly reaching a deal to share the patents with Facebook for a cool $550 million. Many, many more examples of all the top tech companies - Yahoo, Apple, Google, Motorola, RIM - buying and selling huge numbers of patents have proliferated. Many of these patents are frivolous. For example, Apple patented 'smartphone multitasking' and 'swipe...

The fallout from the scandal surrounding the discovery that Wal-Mart headquarters suppressed an internal investigation when it discovered its Mexican subsidiary had been systematically paying bribes has been swift and significant. According to an investigative piece in the New York Times, Wal-Mart used bribes not only to obtain permits for its stores, but to reduce the time required for those permits, from months to days or weeks. The public outcry to denounce the corporation has been loud. But not everyone has joined the opprobrium. Many have said, either implicitly or explicitly, that Wal-Mart was doing business the way business needs...

The Open Government Partnership – 55 countries which all claim to want to be more transparent, effective and accountable – recently met in Brazil. Increasing corporate accountability is one of their five ‘grand challenges’. However new research by the information provision group OpenCorporates highlight the scale of the challenge: governments are not doing very well on making even the most basic of company details available, let alone the more detailed ownership information that’s actually required to prevent corrupt politicians, terrorists and arms traffickers from moving dirty money around the world.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a massive, 3700-word, story on their investigation into aggressive, but legal, tax avoidance at Apple. Apple uses a wide network of subsidiaries in tax havens to shift profits away from high-tax jurisdictions like the United States. Apple has previously been a noted innovator in the tax strategy department, pioneering techniques to drastically reduce their tax bill. Despite explosive growth in Apple's profits, their tax bill has barely budged in recent years.