Financial Transparency Coalition

The Thomson Reuters Foundation is partnering with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) to hold workshops for journalists in African countries to improve their expertise in financial journalism (Full Disclosure: Norad is also a major financial supporter of the Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development). The sessions will have a specific focus on how to track illicit financial flows out of the developing world. From Thomson Reuters:

About 100 journalists, spread over eight courses in different African locations in the course of the next year, will receive intensive training to hone their financial reporting and analytical...

Oxfam International has released a new report calling on the G20 to make the connection between secrecy jurisdictions and the harm they do to developing countries. Section 5 of the report states:

All countries should be able to generate their own income by promoting fair taxation. Yet currently, many countries are constrained in their attempts to raise resources domestically or to apply appropriate tariffs because of problems in the international system. At the G20 London Summit in 2009, leaders promised to stand together against tax evasion and avoidance. The G20 should honour its commitments to tackle the tax havens that...

We recently wrote about the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, describing it as a form of (albeit one-way) automatic information exchange, to help the U.S. tax authorities ferret out tax cheats. A new Reuters story (hat tip: Offshore Watch) highlights one of the effects:

Leumi (LUMI.TA), Israel's biggest bank, is requiring U.S. clients to declare their deposits to the Internal Revenue Service, amid heightened scrutiny of offshore accounts by U.S. authorities. The bank is asking its clients to declare that they are not U.S. clients, or to reveal their ...

On 9 December 2010, the European Parliament’s Committee on Development will vote on the Draft Report on Tax and Development led by Member of the European Parliament Eva Joly.