Financial Transparency Coalition

In late June, we met with members of the Tax Justice Network Africa (TJN-A) and the Africa International Trade Union Confederation (Africa ITUC) for a training and strategy session in Naivasha, a town northwest of Nairobi. The goal of the event was to bring people together to discuss and analyze the problem of illicit financial flows and the lack of transparency, particularly within the extractive sector. It wasn't long after we left the city limits of Nairobi that the landscape changed dramatically, quickly shifting from shopping malls and apartment complexes...

Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington-based NGO and Coordinating Committee member of the FTC, has released a new report highlighting the drain that illicit financial flows have on countries in the developing world. But rather than look at the entire developing world, the report focused on five specific countries in east Africa: Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania. The report investigates trade mis-invoicing—the act of under or over-valuing goods so that a business can move money into our out of a country undetected—and estimates how much tax revenue these five countries...

This post originally appeared on the blog of FTC member, Tax Justice Network. Last year, our colleagues at New Rules for Global Finance published a ground-breaking report on the governance and accountability of the leading financial rule-setting institutions, including those covering international tax cooperation, such as the G20, the OECD, the UN Tax Committee, and the IMF.  Their report is available here.

There is a very important project in the new US budget proposal for financial year 2014 supported by the Obama administration. If this proposal is carried through into law (or regulation), the odds for a truly effective global system of automatic information exchange on tax data about the wealthiest citizens would dramatically increase. Alex Cobham has identified the issue (see here) and the original text of the proposal can be found on page 202, of this pdf document.