Financial Transparency Coalition

This week TIME Magazine opened polling to their readers to weigh in on their nominations for Person of the Year. Generally, I think their picks are pretty good, although sometimes their nominations are a little off the mark (Roger Goodell, really?). Anyway, the nominations got me to thinking what a Transparency Person of the Year would look like. Keeping with TIME’s definition, this would be someone who influenced the news, for better or worse, on issues related to financial transparency. Here are my picks. CARL LEVIN. I’m going to go with the most obvious one first. If I did this...

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Section 1504 of the Act requires oil, gas, and mineral producers who report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose any payments made to foreign governments in the process of developing and extracting materials. Section 1504, or the Cardin-Lugar amendment as it is known, promotes much-needed transparency in the extractive industries sector. It represents the first time a country-by-country reporting policy has been introduced into US law, albeit on a limited scale. The cost of corruption in the extractive...

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity's Director of Government Affairs and Legal Counsel, Heather Lowe, will participate in a high-level meeting of governments and civil society at the U.S. Department of State on Tuesday, July 12, at which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota will launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The Open Government Partnership is a new, multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

In the past year, US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and British Prime Minister David Cameron have been fairly vocal about Pakistan not taxing its elites, while the US and UK give aid to the country. Of course, in a fragile state like Pakistan, statements by the UK and US governments on tax are no doubt motivated by the potential for tax reform to build a strong and responsive state – which is less likely to be a security concern internationally. But Finance Minister, Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, has joined the call for the rich, legislators and media ‘moguls’ to...