Financial Transparency Coalition

PRESS RELEASE The Scottish Government today introduced ground-breaking new measures to bring land ownership into the open, in a move strongly welcomed by Global Witness. These efforts will make it much easier for people in Scotland to know who is really behind ownership of land and hold those people to account. 

Since the financial crisis, we have heard a lot about the revenue governments lose to tax avoidance and evasion, but what about the losses resulting from corruption of governments’ procurement processes? Around the world governments spend $9.5 trillion each year on public works, goods and services. It should be no surprise that fraudsters, and the corrupt, take

Anonymous company ownership doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue does it?  Nor is it a phrase that many people have heard of.  But it should be.  Anonymous company ownership is behind much of what is bad in the world. It’s behind the fraudsters who cheat vulnerable people like the young, the old and the sick out of the resources they need to get by in life.  It’s behind the tax dodgers who don’t pay their fair share towards society.  It’s behind the dishonest public officials who use their positions for personal gain, and the corrupt multinationals that bribe their way...

The U.S. Treasury is in the process of taking a big step toward making it harder for corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and terrorists to make use of the U.S. financial system, by forcing banks to know who their customers actually are. This is something we have been advocating for five years. Treasury recently released a proposed rule and is seeking comment until October 3, 2014. There’s info on how to do that here. It’s worth explaining precisely what we think the problem is, and what the rule should look like if it is...