Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

Los días 6 y 7 de octubre de 2011, con motivo de la tercera conferencia anual del Grupo de trabajo sobre integridad financiera y desarrollo económico (en adelante, Grupo de trabajo) se reunieron en parís, Francia, representantes de la sociedad civil, gobiernos, políticos, académicos, periodistas y el sector privado.

his U4 Issue Paper looks at the potential of these initiatives to reduce illicit financial flows from extractive sectors, particularly those initiatives that target resource revenue governance. Section 2 provides a brief overview of resource governance challenges and the nature of illicit financial flows in extractive sectors, highlighting consequences for development in poor countries. Section 3 summarises international initiatives to improve resource revenue governance, focusing on information disclosure and certification. It also discusses their comparative achievements and factors for success. Section 4 sums up the potential for these initiatives and suggests priorities within them as well as the possible...