Financial Transparency Coalition

Lisa Ann Elges of Task Force coordinating committee member Transparency International praised the latest draft of the G20's "Future We Want" document on Monday for including a goal of anti-corruption. Indeed, as climate change becomes a greater problem that requires mobilization of finances, the current level of corruption will threaten any form of assistance, aid, and prevention. After the 2009 cyclone Aila, for instance, Khadija Begum of Bangladesh complained to Transparency International that the builders constructing her new home, financed by foreign aid, sold the iron and concrete they were given and, instead, constructed a wall-less home of tin...

Action Aid is right to highlight the problem with the UK’s reform of the so called ‘controlled foreign company rules’. I explained this issue for the TUC in June last year on pages 20 – 25 here. The abuse these changes in the rules will allow is real. The cost will be as big as Action Aid estimates. And that, in itself, simply adds to the tax abuse to the poorest countries of the world by the richest corporations in the world.

Publish What You Fund, one of the Task Force's Allied Organizations, has released their 2011 Pilot Aid Transparency Index. The index is relatively unique in that it looks at the donors, rather than the recipients, of aids, and ranks them by how transparent their giving process is. In all, they ranked 58 countries and institutions who collectively give billions of dollars of aid to the developing world.

Whether it’s tackling corporate tax dodging, changing international rules on tax havens, or improving tax systems, everyone involved in the international tax justice movement is aiming to increase the tax take in developing countries. This is both to increase the money available to pay for nurses, teachers and roads, desperately needed when you’re trying to run, say, a health service on a few dollars per person per year - as is the case in many of the poorest countries. It is also to encourage and develop the social contract between state and citizen, improving accountability. And it is to afford...