Financial Transparency Coalition

Targeting Stock Exchanges is Key in Civil Society's Push for Country-by-Country Reporting, writes François Valérian Today, Transparency International and the Revenue Watch Institute have published the Promoting Revenue Transparency 2011 Report on Oil and Gas Companies. This report evaluates corporate reporting performance on anti-corruption programmes, on subsidiaries and partners, as well as on country-level financial results and technical data. The report shows a concerning reporting gap. Most companies score significantly better in reporting on anti-corruption programmes than in country-level reporting of relevant financial and technical data. This gap further illustrates the major focus of corporate communication, at least for listed...

This year, the European Union will review a number of European laws that spell out what types of information companies must disclose in their annual financial reports. Although at first sight this change in accounting rules seems like a dull technical exercise, well designed and transparent accounting standards have the potential to lift the veil of opacity that has contributed to the recent global financial drama and which, for years, has been preventing developing countries from properly taxing the activities of multinational companies operating within their jurisdictions. Civil society groups are calling on the European Union to live up to...

An article the other week in the Ugandan Daily Monitor quotes an official from the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), Mr. Patrick Mukiibi, on the value and implications of illicit flows from that country. According to the article, Uganda loses UGX 2 trillion (approx. USD 866 million) annually through “tax crime”, also termed “economic and tax fraud”. The Ugandan Ministry of Finance says that the current fiscal year (2010/2011) government budget is UGX 7.5 trillion (approx. USD 3.2 billion), and it will need loans and other development assistance to cover 26 percent of this. In other words, the article...

International consensus on almost any policy usually happens step by (excruciating) step. Even reforms that seem obvious in retrospect, like the international laws with respect to bribery and foreign corruption, are initiated by a pioneer (in this case the U.S. in 1977), but take years or even decades for the international community to follow suit. One poignant example is the case of women’s suffrage, which originated in France in the late 1700s, but didn’t take its first big step until the early 1900s, when Australia and Finland granted their citizens universal suffrage. Even with these early...