Financial Transparency Coalition

PRESS RELEASE Bill would help investors, lawmakers and the public make sense of how U.S. companies are operating around the globe WASHINGTON, D.C.—Representative Pocan (D-WI), with Representatives Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), and Gwen Moore (D-WI), have introduced a bill in the United States House of Representatives that seeks to unpack the opacity surrounding corporate disclosure

Under the standard economic theory of crime, compliance with laws is a mix of two important factors. One: the penalty that results if the offender is caught and 2: the probability of the offender getting caught in the first place. If the fine is proportional to the crime, but the probability of being caught is almost certain, few will risk it. In the same way, if the probability of being caught is low, but the penalty is very high, again few will risk it. Gary Becker—the libertarian economist who wrote Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, an...

Australia has long been an international leader on financial transparency issues, whether we're talking about taxes, beneficial ownership academic research, or money laundering laws. They aren't perfect, but it looks like the Australian Parliament will support an important new provision to make their tax system a whole lot more transparent:

Tech companies have been racing to acquire as many patents as possible for the better part of the last few years. Last month, Microsoft announced that it had reached a monster deal with AOL, buying 925 patents from Facebook for $1 billion, and then quickly reaching a deal to share the patents with Facebook for a cool $550 million. Many, many more examples of all the top tech companies - Yahoo, Apple, Google, Motorola, RIM - buying and selling huge numbers of patents have proliferated. Many of these patents are frivolous. For example, Apple patented 'smartphone multitasking' and 'swipe...