Financial Transparency Coalition

I’m in Oslo this morning to talk about the International Accounting Standards Board proposals for accounting for the extractive industries, and those relating to the demand for country-by-country reporting in this sector in particular. The slides I’ll be using are here. I’ll be publishing much more on this issue soon. Suffice to say, that as I note in the slides there are four fundamental problems with the IASB response:

• Their refusal to consider the needs of civil society
• Failure to define materiality appropriately
• Technical incoherence of the response
• The voluntary opt out from disclosure built into...

Source: PWYP International The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) took important steps today to improve reporting and disclosure by the oil, gas and mining industries. But extractive industry experts said the proposals have been weakened by pressure from companies and have yet to clearly recommend reporting of the full information that investors and citizens need. In its formal “Discussion Paper” for a new extractive activities standard, the world’s leading rule-setter for accounting explores several new reporting requirements for reserves, production and costs. The Discussion Paper, which represents an important step in the...

Paul Collier of Oxford is speaking at the Task Force – he chairs its economists panel. One third of Africa’s wealth is outside Africa he says. If returned that would increase its capital by 50%. And as he notes the social return on capital on that in Africa would be vastly, vastly more in Africa than it could ever be outside because capital is so scarce in Africa. And as he also points out – the true cost of corruption is the defeat of honest politicians...

David McNair, senior economic justice advisor at Christian Aid and a contributor to this blog, wrote a fantastic essay for politics.co.uk today, in which he highlights the disastrous ramifications posed by tax havens for developing countries and calls for the adoption of country-by-country reporting standards and automatic exchange of tax information. McNair specifically notes that transfer mispricing alone (an illicit technique used by multinational corporations to evade paying taxes) costs developing countries $160 billion per year according to Christian Aid research. Indeed, the problem is likely even larger than this as Global Financial Integrity has published...