Financial Transparency Coalition

In his State of the Union address less than a month ago President Obama brought up a basic minimum corporate tax. He noted that “companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas” and that American companies should not be allowed to use these mechanisms to avoid paying their fair share. But in order to change this status quo, legislators need to close the loopholes that allow companies to drive down their effective tax rates far below the official rate. This needs to happen. There are far too many corporate tax loopholes—which are deductions, credits, and other tax expenditures...

When the G20 signed the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters in November 2011, amid great fanfare, the OECD, a club of wealthy countries, set out to promote it as the 'gold standard' of international tax cooperation. As is often the case (see here or here), the OECD's viewpoint is not quite the full story. While the Convention definitely provides various positive things -- most importantly a tacit assertion that automatic information exchange must be part of effective information exchange -- it also includes clear downsides.

About three years ago, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) caught wind that Swiss bankers from Swiss banking giant, UBS, were traveling to the United States and systematically offering wealthy Americans the opportunity to evade taxes. They also learned UBS formed offshore non-U.S. companies for investors’ assets and then engaged in an aggressive cover-up to conceal these activities. After an intense investigation by the IRS, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) pursued both criminal and civil charges against the giant Swiss bank. Federal prosecutors dropped criminal charges eighteen months later, however, after the bank admitted to fraud and conspiracy,...

Monday's top news stories from Global Financial Integrity.