Financial Transparency Coalition

This week, European Union finance ministers agreed to establish a common EU blacklist of so-called “non-cooperative jurisdictions” – in other words, tax havens. With one tax scandal unfolding after the other, listing and sanctioning tax havens may seem like a good solution. However, as tempting as it may sound, this EU exercise is doomed to fail –

When most people think of the Netherlands, what may first come to mind are charming canal-side towns filled with people riding bicycles amid tulip fields and windmills. But the Netherlands is much more than windmills and tulips.

This blog post is the second in a two-part blog series. In this post, I survey this year’s progress and momentum in global policy on transparency issues. In the first post, I examined several of the year’s biggest global trends and their relationship to financial transparency. The European Union has made huge policy progress this year. From anti-money laundering to country-by-country reporting, when it comes to transparency issues, the EU was an all-star. In perhaps the biggest news out of the EU this year, after months of deliberations, EU nations agreed to national-level registries to collect information on the beneficial...

The EU Savings Tax Directive (EUSTD) has been the EU’s flagship transparency initiative since its introduction in 2003, and we have written about it on many occasions. It complements another EU transparency scheme called the Directive on Administrative Co-operation, which was beefed up this week, as the Wall St. Journal reported:

“European Union finance ministers agreed Tuesday on a far-reaching crackdown on tax evasion that will bring the bloc’s standards on par with global rules by 2017, although Austria is getting an extra year to build up a data-exchange system with its banks.”

The DAC currently covers only EU Member states, while the EUSTD is extended by agreement...