Financial Transparency Coalition

What do you call an entity with huge amounts of money, a monopoly on a hugely popular good, and no transparency or accountability structure whatsoever? The answer is not a corporation or a corrupt dictator. It’s FIFA. FIFA (in French: Fédération Internationale de Football Association) has a long history of bribery, questionable profits, scandals, and shadowy deals. As Tax Justice Network has shown, the organization has created its own “tax bubble,” forcing nations out of tax revenue by negotiating tax exemption from all types of levies, including income and sales taxes. Christian Aid has, for example, shown that in the...

On Monday, U.S. authorities are set to announce a massive $8.9 million fine on the French bank BNP Paribas. The fine is part of a deal under which the bank will pay for allegedly breaching U.S. sanctions with Iran, Sudan, and Cuba and handling $30 billion in transactions from those nations. Fines like this, even

For a while now, we've been writing about the ongoing effort by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to create new standards for the exchange of tax and financial information between countries. The new system would help clamp down on corrupt individuals that hide their money in countries with strict secrecy laws and low tax rates. While there are many questions still remaining about implementation, one thing is clear: developing countries must be included. Some of the largest cases of illicit financial flows involve money being siphoned...

The IMF has a major new Policy Paper out entitled Spillovers in International Taxation, looking at the effects that one country’s tax rules and practices can have on others. Of course the IMF would never be so rude to some of its most powerful member states as to explicitly say what is in our headline – but that’s what we read between the lines. “Spillovers” in international tax are all about tax haven activity, particularly when those spillovers are deliberately crafted. Now that we’ve read it, we conclude that this is a really important document. It tears...