Financial Transparency Coalition

ONE in four people paid a bribe during the past year, according to the latest Global Corruption Barometer, which is published annually by Transparency International.

I am in the US to talk about country-by-country reporting at Yale University. The slides I’ll be using are here. As I say in them:

—CBC is a new way of looking at the MNC —It is in essence a demand for a profit and loss account and limited balance sheet for each country in which the MNC trades —But it’s also something much more than that —This is an accounting system that roots the corporation in the countries that host it – and not somewhere floating above them —And this is accounting that says the MNC is an entity in its own ...

It’s been argued – even to their shame by Labour politicians – that it’s inappropriate to target individual companies when protesting about tax avoidance. That’s wrong, for three reasons. First, the decision to tax avoid or not is that of the individual company. No one asks them to. Despite the claims made by some company directors and some apologists for this abuse, company directors are under no obligation to minimise their tax bills. Indeed, if doing so increases the risk within their companies it’s quite easy to argue that they’re acting against...

EVER since Panama founded its offshore banking centre in the 1970s, its governments have vowed to resist international demands for information about assets held by foreign citizens in the country.