Financial Transparency Coalition

According to a recent editorial from The Guardian, the illicit activities that drive capital flight, such as drug trafficking and terrorist financing, are actually supported by legal infrastructure. Namely, the lack of transparency in regions designated as "tax havens" allows for elaborate tax avoidance schemes and money laundering that funds these sorts of activities. As an example, banking company HSBC reportedly held a Cayman Islands subsidiary that "handled some 60,000 accounts," which "drug lords used . . . to fuel their jet-set lives." According to the newspaper, politicians must address the issue of tax haven abuse. In affected countries such...

The U.S. government frequently raises the issue of smuggling of bulk shipments of currency from the U.S. to Mexico as a major economic and security issue, one that demands greater effort by Mexican authorities to detect and deter. However, as a report released this week by Global Financial Integrity reveals, bulk cash smuggling is not the only form of illicit financial transfer taking place in staggering volumes across the U.S. - Mexico border.

WASHINGTON DC - As international financial turmoil intensifies, G20 leaders of the world’s largest economies meeting in Cannes produced a final document that offers some limited hope for international financial transparency and meaningful action on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. “Governments around the globe are missing the funds necessary for promoting growth and combating poverty. But these funds haven’t vanished off the face of the Earth. They’ve simply been rerouted from public coffers to private pockets via aggressive tax dodging and grand corruption,” Raymond Baker, director of the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development commented today.

The FACT Coalition released a document detailing their legislative asks yesterday. The document does a great job of detailing important ways to keep the financial system accountable, both in a domestic and international sense. The entire document can be downloaded below the 'read more' or at the 'PDF' link in the post title.