Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A proposal to stop rich Americans from stashing assets offshore to evade taxes, by slapping penalties on individuals and foreign financial institutions, was introduced on Tuesday in the U.S. Congress.

I’ve written more words on secrecy jurisdictions than most. I’m credited by some with defining the term. Now the research project on secrecy jurisdictions on which I have been working with a small but first rate team from the Tax Justice Network (Markus Meinzer, John Christensen and Paul Sagar) has delivered its first output. That output is on secrecyjurisdictions.com. You could pass an hour or two there easily: actually, rather more than that as this is, almost without doubt, the biggest database on secrecy jurisdictions ever built. There are something like 1,800 pages of data on the site...

Today the Tax Justice Network launches a major new project called Mapping the Faultlines, backed by research funding from the Ford Foundation. This has been the biggest and most elaborate research effort ever undertaken to look at how secrecy operates through global financial markets. As the project brief notes, it is intended to complement work by Global Financial Integrity in Washington, D.C., looking at the magnitudes of these problems. While putting together this material, which would run to more than 1,800 pages if printed, we have felt like explorers charting territory previously mapped in only the scantiest...

WASHINGTON – Roberto Cittadini of Bellevue, Wash., pleaded guilty today to filing a false tax return, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced. Cittadini appeared today before Magistrate Judge Mary Alice Theiler in Seattle and accepted responsibility for concealing nearly $2 million in Swiss bank accounts. According to court documents and statements made in court, Cittadini, a retired sales manager for Boeing, failed to report income from bank accounts under his control at UBS AG in Switzerland on his individual income tax returns from 2001 through 2003. Additionally, Cittadini failed to file a Report of Foreign Bank...