Financial Transparency Coalition

If you’re not one of the 112 million people to have already watched Jason Russell's Kony 2012 video on YouTube, you might be inclined to tune in here first. Kony 2012 is part-documentary, part-over-produced-Hollywood-flick that has engendered an enormous amount of attention and emotion on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. It concerns Joseph Kony, a warlord from Uganda who, with the help of his forces, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has abducted and enslaved tens of thousands of children in his own country, as well as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. He remains...

When the G20 signed the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters in November 2011, amid great fanfare, the OECD, a club of wealthy countries, set out to promote it as the 'gold standard' of international tax cooperation. As is often the case (see here or here), the OECD's viewpoint is not quite the full story. While the Convention definitely provides various positive things -- most importantly a tacit assertion that automatic information exchange must be part of effective information exchange -- it also includes clear downsides.

The international community has repeatedly stressed the need to mobilise domestic resources in developing countries, as the most sustainable way of financing development and ending aid dependency. Yet, many developing countries are affected by a number of challenges that limit their capacity to collect taxes. One such challenge is multinational companies’ lack of accountability regarding their operations and more specifically regarding the taxes they pay. This report explains how the cross border nature of multinational companies’ operations combined with the absence of adequate transparency regulations have very damaging implications for a country’s ability to mobilise domestic resources. Although this...

Taxation plays an important role in democratic governance and market economies. Tax revenue finances social and physical infrastructure. It reinforces national sovereignty. When coupled with good governance and institutions, it ensures that the costs and benefits of development are felt across society.