Financial Transparency Coalition

The fallout from the scandal surrounding the discovery that Wal-Mart headquarters suppressed an internal investigation when it discovered its Mexican subsidiary had been systematically paying bribes has been swift and significant. According to an investigative piece in the New York Times, Wal-Mart used bribes not only to obtain permits for its stores, but to reduce the time required for those permits, from months to days or weeks. The public outcry to denounce the corporation has been loud. But not everyone has joined the opprobrium. Many have said, either implicitly or explicitly, that Wal-Mart was doing business the way business needs...

The Open Government Partnership – 55 countries which all claim to want to be more transparent, effective and accountable – recently met in Brazil. Increasing corporate accountability is one of their five ‘grand challenges’. However new research by the information provision group OpenCorporates highlight the scale of the challenge: governments are not doing very well on making even the most basic of company details available, let alone the more detailed ownership information that’s actually required to prevent corrupt politicians, terrorists and arms traffickers from moving dirty money around the world.

WASHIGNTON, DC – A front-page article in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times drew attention to shady accounting techniques utilized by Apple Inc, the technology giant, to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes each year. However, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) notes that Apple’s tax dodging is only one example of a larger problem: most multinational enterprises abuse tax haven secrecy. Tax haven abuses are estimated to cost the Internal Revenue Service US$100 billion per year and developing economies roughly US$1 trillion annually.