Financial Transparency Coalition

On Monday, the United Nations released a so-called “Zero Draft” of the Financing for Development (FfD) Conference Outcome Document. Simply stated, this draft lays out the current political consensus on a vast array of development issues including how to address the growing problem of illicit financial flows (IFFs). It is by no means the final word on IFFs—or any other issue for that matter—but it gives a good indication where things are heading.

The corporate income tax is under attack. Nation states are scrambling to offer multinational corporations an ever growing feast of lower taxes, loopholes and incentives. Lobbyists and politicians constantly try to persuade us that the corporate tax is a bad, inefficient, unreasonable tax. Yet it is one of the most precious of all taxes. One of our ten points concerns revenue. Corporate income taxes have added up to almost US$ 7.5 trillion since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, in OECD countries alone. This is nearly half of all OECD public health spending and around double the amount spent...

The European Commission’s new measures to combat secret tax deals made between multinational companies and governments cannot be called tax transparency, as they fail to give citizens access to any information.  The Tax Transparency Package, published today in response to the Luxembourg Leaks scandal, makes some improvements to the information that tax administrations receive, but keeps tax rulings confidential, denying proper public scrutiny of governments’ tax administrations and large companies.  Tove Ryding, Head of Tax Justice at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), said: “This is not tax...

BRUSSELS—Weeks after the shocking revelations of wide-spread tax evasion at HSBC’s Swiss branch, a new report from a European Commission expert group on the Automatic Exchange of Financial Information (AEFI) makes it clear that the world can’t afford to exclude developing countries from new anti-tax evasion measures. The expert group set out to address a number of questions around new efforts to clamp down on tax evasion through the automatic exchange of financial information between governments. Composed of business and industry associations, as well as some civil society groups, including the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC), the panel concluded that...