Financial Transparency Coalition

The year 2026 has started with escalating tensions and wider risks that undermine further advances in transparency and tax justice, as seen on 3 January with the US kidnap of the Venezuelan head of state, Nicolas Maduro, the US threats on the sovereignty of Greenland, or indeed the continued Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine soon in its 4^th year, and conflicts in Sudan and Congo, major oil and mineral exporters, respectively.

Despite the conflicts and headlines, 2026 will see critically important multilateral tax negotiations taking place in New York (February and August) and Nairobi (November-December). We also look forwards to mobilising against austerity narrative and policies by the World Bank and the IMF during their Annual Meetings to be held in Bangkok in October, and Our Oceans Conference taking place in June in Mombasa among many other highlights to push for fisheries transparency, and COP31 to push for forestry transparency and fossil fuel transparency with a view of a treaty banning them.

Countries who have chosen the path of conflict and war still have a choice to either build multilateral institutions through effective participation and norm elaboration, and we highlight five key opportunities below for 2026.

1. Austerity policies continue to harm over 6 billion people, and are supported by the IMF, the World Bank, and the OECD during the rising cost of living, crises, and instability. The ideology of austerity assumes that revenue is finite, and that a state is like a household that has no levers to change economic structures or underlying policies. They do not assume cuts to harm employment or economic activity.  This is untrue. You can collect more revenue from wealth, corporations and high-income earners and from extractive industries, along with other measures like solving the debt crisis and monetary policy levers. States can use revenues to improve productivity, support industries, levels of education, health and infrastructure that create further growth and tax revenue. States also issue money in their currency through new debt and set rules for how debt is governed.  This year in 2026, it is estimated that austerity policies will impact over 6 billion people living under them. Almost all countries are cutting budgets.

We can see hope emerging, for instance, Colombia adopting progressive tax measures, and progressive tax reforms in Brazil, but both find it difficult to approve most wide-ranging measures in their respective parliaments. Similarly, in Europe, five countries raised corporate taxes (Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia and France) as opposed Iceland, Portugal and Luxembourg, lowering corporate taxes. Meanwhile, Morocco is raising corporate tax rates, and Tunisia has adopted a wealth tax. Some tax havens have raised their corporate tax rates above the OECD Global Minimum Tax Rate, but only for large companies to continue tax abuses for any company not falling under new OECD rules. The OECD rules also exempt US companies in the latest ‘side-by-side’ system to exempt US companies.  But, largely corporations can still get away with dodging taxes as before, despite a small positive development as the year 2024 was the first year since two decades that headline corporate income tax rates slightly rose to 21.3% across 143 countries.

There are now alternative narratives and bodies such as UNCTAD’s work on ending Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) as part of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Financing for Development (FfD) processes, and the Human Rights Economy (HRE) initiative by the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR) that we seek to build alternative economic narratives that are based on human rights, sustainable development and the right to development that need reinforcing.

FTC will also launch the People’s Fiscal Monitor during February 2026 to document progressive fiscal policies for improving care and social protection, to coincide with the UN Tax Negotiations.

2. We need public transparency of company and trust beneficial ownership, as well as key assets being placed in a public Global Asset Registry (GAR) to combat Illicit Financial Flows. Undoing the harmful damage caused by the secrecy of the super-rich and large corporations requires targeting sectors that have the highest impact in terms of greater transparency and making the case through these sectors and tackling wider abuses in all sectors. We have worked to uncover the fishy networks behind Illicit Fishing, with only 16% a single shareholder being found for companies linked with Illegal, Unregulated or Unreported (IUU) fishing related offences, or forced labour related offences as uncovered in our report regarding the dark webs of forced labour related fishing vessels. In Illicit logging related crimes, not a single beneficial owner can be verified in most countries, as source country BO registries and asset registries are closed, and forestry investors abroad do not disclose their beneficial owners.

In 2026, the African Union will be expanding the use of the Policy Tracker Tool jointly with ATAF and Tax Justice network Africa to fight Illicit Financial Flows from Africa (following the commitment from the Mbeki Panel).  FTC Will launch the monitoring on BO and Asset Registries this year initially in the LAC region, and later in other regions.  Meanwhile, the UK holding a major international illicit finance conference on June 23-24that should discuss all aspects of IFFs, as the UK is mainly interested in illicit minerals, and illicit real-estate and Russian Oligarchs. We also look forwards to the second year of the LAC Tax Platform (PT-LAC) presidency by Brazil, in continuing regional tax co-operation and advancing financial transparency norms in LAC. The International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) will be held in the Dominican Republic in December 2026.

In the area of transparency of natural resources, we are worried that the European Commission will further delay the implementation of the EU Deforestation Rule (EUDR) until mid-2027 as is now being discussed.  This landmark rule would ban the import of agricultural commodities linked to recent (post 2020) deforestation, cutting thus the incentive to illicitly log land to grow soy, beef or palm oil as main drivers of illicit deforestation.

As the FTC, we continue to highlight the high-risk commodities that drive IFFs, such as illicit fishing, illicit logging, commodities grown on illicitly logged land, as well as illicit gold and other critical minerals for the climate transition.  These continue to cause elevated levels of illicit financial flows.  We also aim to work with communities, members and partners to trace illicit financial flows in these sectors and actively participate in international conferences and negotiations concerning oceans, forests, and critical minerals from a financial transparency perspective.

3. The UN Framework Convention on International Tax Co-operation (UN Tax Convention for short) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to raise the ambition on financial transparency and tax justice. This could concretely mean that states decide as part of the convention to establish a Global Asset Registry (GAR) with public access under the auspices of the UN, a mechanism to coordinate and make interoperable information on taxable assets and potentially assets that are abused for illicit purposes.  This would be a basis for future work in the UN Tax Convention to develop protocols on taxing High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI), as well as tackling Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) such as illicit extraction of natural resources and tax abuses by large companies and wealthy people.

But, the counter weight is the lack of enthusiasm in Europe for public BO or Asset Registries due to the ruling of the European Court of Justice in 2022 that effectively shut down public access to BO (and later impacting asset registries as well).  Furthermore this year in 2026, we foresee that also public access to shareholder registries may be at risk following a similar court case building up at the European Court of Justice based on a case in Latvia regarding the public access to minority shareholders.  The practice of publishing the names of shareholders is common across parts of Europe, while also publishing major shareholders is a common practice by most stock exchanges.  These regressive interpretations of only on-request access to BO, wider shareholder, and asset ownership data are impacting the position of EU states in the negotiations at the UN Tax Convention, as well as bilateral advice given to Global South states via multilateral organisations (OECD, IMF, WB) and bilaterally via development cooperation programmes that aim to strengthen tax administrations and tax policies.

In 2026, we will focus on negotiations in February (New York), August (New York), and November-December (Nairobi).  We will launch a renewed framework for Financial Transparency (namely the ABC-DEFG of Financial Transparency) that meets the needs for taxation of large companies and the wealthy, as well as tackling IFFs in natural resources and ending corruption, especially in public contracts and procurement.   The year 2025 showed us that almost all countries (except the USA) were present in negotiating the first steps of the UN Tax Convention, but we expect hurdles in 2026 as negotiations reach the stage of agreeing on concrete language on the future of taxing large corporations and the super-rich, and how to divide that revenue between states and resolve disputes.

We will work with different thematic constituencies in the UN Tax Convention process, gender, forestry, fisheries, and wider extractive industries to build the case that these issues can be effectively addressed by an ambitious UN Tax Convention.

4. Financing the care economy and social protection in times of multiple crisis. We now live in a permanent crisis, where those who have the least resources and means are absorbing every new social and economic shock.  This is why rebuilding societies around care and highlighting care as a fundamental right is critical.  Since the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions like UN Women and ILO have highlighted the centrality of care in society, while trade unions advocate for the social organisation of care along with civil society have shown how societies developed around care as a transformative act that will not just help economic recover but also balance power and vested interests in society.

At the FTC, we have focused on care financing from progressive taxation as a critical element of this narrative, not just earmarked and tax-exempt contributions from employers that may further widen disparities in care provisions, but public resources from large corporations and the richest people need to be raised to finance public provision of care systems and public provision of universal social protection.  Care financing and societies centred around care are critical to building new economic models such as the Rights-Based Economy.

5. Polluters should pay more taxes and face bans for the use of fossil fuels. This year we align with major campaigns working to mobilise climate financing from progressive taxation. This can raise much-needed climate finance, which should not be paid by those who are already facing a high cost of living through higher taxes on consumption and goods that they need for their daily lives. Climate financing needs as a result of agreeing to the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), agreed upon at COP29 (in 2024), set a floor of $300 billion per year by 2035 for developed countries to provide climate finance to developing nations, coupled with a call for all actors to scale up total finance to at least $1.3 trillion annually from all sources.  Only transformative financing from sources like higher corporate taxes, wealth taxes, and greater taxing of fossil fuel polluting companies and asset owners can raise this much financing.

The climate COP 31 in Türkiye will be held in November 2026, and the first ever meeting of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty in Santa Marta in Colombia April 2026, together with efforts for forestry transparency and fisheries transparency as ways to end the overexploitation of natural resources that also act as carbon sinks.