Financial Transparency Coalition

The results of the 2009 Financial Secrecy Index Finally, the time has come to reveal the names of the secrecy jurisdictions that we have ranked according to both their lack of transparency and their scale of cross-border financial activity. For the first time ever, and based on far, far stronger criteria than those used by the OECD, we can now announce the world’s leading secrecy jurisdictions. Nothing remotely like this has ever been done before. Our new index assesses each jurisdiction on an opacity rating – how secretive the jurisdiction is – combined with a weighting according to size. We...

Summary: Recent events have highlighted the growing use of foreign financial institutions, foreign trusts, and foreign corporations by U.S. individuals to evade U.S. tax. In order to prevent this tax evasion, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2009 would provide the U.S. Treasury Department with significant new tools to find and prosecute U.S. individuals that hide assets overseas from the Internal Revenue Service.

Washington, D.C. – Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D?Mont.), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D?NY), senior Senate Finance Committee member John Kerry (D?MA) and Ways and Means Select Revenue Subcommittee Chairman Richard Neal (D?MA) today unveiled a comprehensive proposal to clamp down on tax evasion and improve taxpayer compliance by giving the IRS new administrative tools to detect, deter and discourage offshore tax abuses.

US Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and US House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel today introduced legislation aimed at curtailing offshore tax evasion. From Reuters:

Under the proposed bill, foreign banks would be forced to disclose information about American customers, or face a 30 percent tax on their income from U.S. financial assets.

The legislation would crack down on shell companies by requiring a foreign corporation to give the U.S. Treasury the names of Americans who own more than 10 percent of its shares.