Illicit Money: Can It Be Stopped?
November 16th, 2009
By Raymond Baker & Eva Joly
New York Review of Books
On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President’s proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex “shadow” financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.