Financial Transparency Coalition

Are you an ambitious journalist in Africa with an interest in probing illicit finance, money laundering, and tax related abuses? Or, perhaps, you represent an outstanding, independent media organization based in Africa with a desire and reputation for exposing financial crime and corruption? Either way, the Thomson Reuters Foundation is launching a new three-year program assisting African media on the reporting of illicit finance and tax abuse, and they are hoping that you will apply.

In late June, we met with members of the Tax Justice Network Africa (TJN-A) and the Africa International Trade Union Confederation (Africa ITUC) for a training and strategy session in Naivasha, a town northwest of Nairobi. The goal of the event was to bring people together to discuss and analyze the problem of illicit financial flows and the lack of transparency, particularly within the extractive sector. It wasn't long after we left the city limits of Nairobi that the landscape changed dramatically, quickly shifting from shopping malls and apartment complexes...

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” He might well have said development. Regions that have experienced the fastest growth in the last fifty years have also had a tax base they could use to invest in the infrastructure of growth – roads, schools, and health. While some have argued that taxes impede growth, the long-term picture doesn’t sit well with that theory.

Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington-based NGO and Coordinating Committee member of the FTC, has released a new report highlighting the drain that illicit financial flows have on countries in the developing world. But rather than look at the entire developing world, the report focused on five specific countries in east Africa: Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania. The report investigates trade mis-invoicing—the act of under or over-valuing goods so that a business can move money into our out of a country undetected—and estimates how much tax revenue these five countries...