Financial Transparency Coalition

Lately, we've had quite a few reasons to get outraged as global citizens, especially when looking at the financial system, which seems all too well rigged in favor of a small, wealthy elite. We've learned of secret tax deals undoubtedly concocted in ominously tall office buildings between some of the worlds biggest companies and a tax haven; and we've also learned of billions of dollars that were being held by a Swiss bank by the world's wealthiest, amid claims that the bank was helping many of these people...

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...