Financial Transparency Coalition

Over the weekend, the New York Times alleged that Wal-Mart deliberately hid investigations into bribery practices at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private sector employer with currently 209,000 employees. Allegedly there is a paper trail that includes hundreds of suspect payments worth more 24 million USD in total.

Switzerland has just signed a ‘Rubik’ deal with Austria which protects banks secrecy in return for an anonymous tax being returned to Austria. This is similar to the ruinous Rubik deals made with Britain and Germany. This deal, which must be ratified by both countries’ parliaments, makes public a covert Swiss-Austrian alliance to block EU cooperation against tax dodgers and prevent automatic exchange of tax information between European governments.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once famously wrote that "taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society"—a notion implicitly acknowledged by each of us when we file our tax returns with the IRS every April. Yet civilized society, at home and abroad, is precariously at risk today unless we do something to stem the rampant tax dodging facilitated by tax havens.