Financial Transparency Coalition

The final two months of 2014 saw a surge of positive news for civil society whose collaborative and consolidated efforts over recent years to push for greater corporate transparency measures are now seeing the light. Civil society has called for greater light to be shed on the real living people who ultimately own or control companies – the beneficial owners. Current levels of secrecy mean that global detection rates for illicit funds by law enforcement are as low as 1 percent for criminal proceeds.

WASHINGTON D.C. — Newly leaked documents detailed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists describe worrying tax arrangements negotiated between Luxembourg and more than 340 multinational companies. The details of the agreements offer a first hand look at the methods use by corporations to shift profits around the world with ease. “While G20 leaders proclaim that

In a new report released this week titled Transparency in Corporate Reporting: Assessing the World’s Largest Companies anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) analyzes the disclosure practices of the world’s largest publicly listed companies. This report is part of a series of studies aimed at evaluating the corporate world’s transparency and accountability practices. In this report, TI looks at 124 corporations and scores them on transparency according to three dimensions: reporting on anti-corruption programs, organizational transparency, and country-by-country reporting. TI’s research finds that many companies are fairly transparent regarding their anti-corruption...

WASHINGTON, DC – While noting significant progress today in the global effort to curb tax evasion, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) expressed concerns that the OECD/G20 movement toward automatic exchange of financial information was excluding the world’s poorest countries from reaping any benefits while failing to deal with the issue of illicit financial flows in comprehensive manor. 89 countries committed Wednesday to implement automatic exchange of financial information between jurisdictions by the end of 2017 or 2018 at the annual meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes in Berlin.