Financial Transparency Coalition

Last year Itai Grinberg, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in the U.S., published an important paper entitled Beyond FATCA: An Evolutionary Moment for the International Tax System, providing a comprehensive overview of the emerging international architecture of financial transparency, with different models of information exchange (see below) jostling for supremacy.

Joshua Keating posted some excellent information over at Foreign Policy today: Research from Niels Johannesen of the University of Copenhagen and Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics looks at the result ofinternational agreements taken to prevent tax evasion in the wake of the global financial crisis. The results are not very encouraging for reformers:

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity today applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for working with over fifty jurisdictions to establish agreements enabling the bilateral automatic exchange of tax information as part of the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

The G20, as anyone who is familiar with the slow moving tendencies of international organizations will attest to, has taken quite awhile to get behind the idea of cracking down on tax havens and fighting illicit financial flows from both developed and developing countries. The G20 initially recognized these issues as a problem for the internet national community to do something them in early 2009, but it took a slow evolution of statements over the three years for that recognition to be fully fleshed out into concrete actions and orders.