Financial Transparency Coalition

OECD countries acknowledge that taxes must play a role in the process of fiscal consolidation as they battle unprecedented budget deficits. New OECD data in the annual Revenue Statistics publication show that the majority of OECD governments have stabilised their tax to GDP, with the average ratio moving up slightly from 33.8% in 2009 to 33.9% (1) in 2010. That’s still down from 34.6% in 2008 and well below the most recent high point of 2007 when tax to GDP ratios averaged 35.2%.

In this report, we first estimate the absolute size of a country's shadow economy based on its own published estimate of its GDP and recently-reported data on the size of shadow economies published by the world bank. This, and other data we use, is what we think the best currently available for the purpose of this report and, as such, should provide the best estimates possible. By the definition used here, economic activity in the shadow economy of a country will be tax-evading. So we next calculate an estimate of the amount of tax lost as a result of the...

Law enforcement must be able to impose appropriate penalties when companies bribe officials to win contracts or gain undue advantages. But calculating and confiscating the proceeds of this crime is difficult. To help governments meet this challenge, the OECD and the World Bank/UNODC Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR) released today a new study on the Identification and Quantification of the Proceeds of Bribery. “Countries’ ability to seize and confiscate the gains from bribery is integral to the international fight against bribery and corruption, ” said Mark Pieth, Chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery, made up of representatives from...

The international community has repeatedly stressed the need to mobilise domestic resources in developing countries, as the most sustainable way of financing development and ending aid dependency. Yet, many developing countries are affected by a number of challenges that limit their capacity to collect taxes. One such challenge is multinational companies’ lack of accountability regarding their operations and more specifically regarding the taxes they pay. This report explains how the cross border nature of multinational companies’ operations combined with the absence of adequate transparency regulations have very damaging implications for a country’s ability to mobilise domestic resources. Although this...