Financial Transparency Coalition

BRUSSELS—In another move that places Europe at the forefront of the financial transparency wave, the Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee of European Parliament voted in favor of a Shareholders Rights Directive that includes a requirement for multinational corporations (MNCs) to publicly report financial information on a country by country level.

Yesterday, the Federation of European Accountants (FEE), a group that represents 47 institutes from more than 36 European countries, held their fourth annual tax day at the European Parliament in Brussels. As a part of their vast program for the day, the FEE released a publication taking a look at tax and transparency policies and what the future

Lately, we've had quite a few reasons to get outraged as global citizens, especially when looking at the financial system, which seems all too well rigged in favor of a small, wealthy elite. We've learned of secret tax deals undoubtedly concocted in ominously tall office buildings between some of the worlds biggest companies and a tax haven; and we've also learned of billions of dollars that were being held by a Swiss bank by the world's wealthiest, amid claims that the bank was helping many of these people...

The corporate income tax is under attack. Nation states are scrambling to offer multinational corporations an ever growing feast of lower taxes, loopholes and incentives. Lobbyists and politicians constantly try to persuade us that the corporate tax is a bad, inefficient, unreasonable tax. Yet it is one of the most precious of all taxes. One of our ten points concerns revenue. Corporate income taxes have added up to almost US$ 7.5 trillion since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, in OECD countries alone. This is nearly half of all OECD public health spending and around double the amount spent...