Financial Transparency Coalition

This week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released the full version of its new standard for automatic tax information exchange. Under the standard, governments would collect data from financial institutions on investment income, financial assets, and account balances paid to non-resident accountholders. On an annual basis, participating governments would exchange that information automatically with other jurisdictions. In a statement, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said the launch “moves us closer to a world in which tax cheats have nowhere left to hide.” This impetus for this new standard came from a mandate by G20 nations and the OECD...

The Tax Justice Network an FTC member, just released the July installment of TaxCast, a podcast featuring a detailed look at the previous month's tax news. In the Tax Justice Network’s latest podcast: What really happened at the Google shareholder meeting vote on a proposal for ethical tax principles? Plus: we discuss what the new tax haven-friendly EU Commission President might do (or not do), anti-democratic moves in Hong Kong from the big four accountancy firms, and: forget the OECD’s global tax reform – developing countries can and are doing it...

Illicit financial flows affect countries all over the world. Unfortunately, developing countries seem to suffer the greatest due to illicit outflows. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, loses roughly 5.7% of its overall Gross Domestic Product every year to illicit flows, according to research from FTC member Global Financial Integrity. Along with advocating for strong policy changes, it’s important that a robust and informed press investigates cases of tax evasion, corruption, and harmful tax practices that rob governments of much needed revenue.

On Monday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released detailed guidelines on the common reporting standard for automatic exchange of financial information (AEOI). The plan inches closer to implementation of a global standard but continues to keep developing countries looking in from the outside. Rather than offer a period of non-reciprocity, where developing countries could simply receive financial data, the only mention of non-reciprocity agreements is catered to tax havens.