Financial Transparency Coalition

The Taxcast looks at privatisation and tax: what happens when public assets or services get into private hands? Also: Google’s challenged on its tax affairs by its own shareholders; will Congress block the US administration’s decision to agree to the G20′s global transparency standard? And whatever happened to the UK government’s ‘leadership’ on public registers of the real owners of companies now it turns out it’ll ‘encourage’ but not ‘force’ its overseas territories & Crown dependencies to sign up to the initiative?

Last week, Credit Suisse, a staple of the Swiss banking industry, pleaded guilty to conspiring to help US citizens "hide their wealth" for decades, in order to avoid taxes. The debate that has emerged in the wake of US Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement seems to focus on whether or not the fine—roughly US$2.6 billion—is fair. Is it high enough? It might not be much more than a couple of month’s earnings for this major bank. In the wake of the guilty plea, does this settlement prove the suspicion of many that...

While we still have a long way to go, the last decade has made it much harder for terrorists to hide money from authorities.  About fifteen years ago, an article in the Washington Post argued Osama bin Laden was able to “shroud his finances in such secrecy and with so many front companies that American officials acknowledge it could take years to decipher them.”  At the time, U.S. officials understood that the key to bin Laden’s power was his extensive wealth.  Yet they were stymied in their ability to track his or other terrorists’ resources as they did not have...

The Swiss Federal Council on Wednesday issued a statement making it all too clear what it thinks “the new global standard for the automatic exchange of information in tax matters” should look like. This concerns the OECD’s ongoing project to create a new framework for international financial transparency, which we’ve written about before: while we found shortcomings, we welcomed the project overall. The OECD is expected to finalise its global standard in June. The Swiss position is a direct threat to global moves on transparency.