Financial Transparency Coalition

Like lava lamps, parachute pants, and Twitter, it has become a fad to rave about fetching back illicit funds stashed abroad. Of course, like any first-rate fad, there was a trendsetting pair, which in this case was the U.S. and Swiss bank UBS. The pair linked up earlier this year when the IRS caught wind that Swiss bankers were traveling to the U.S., offering Americans access to superior wealth management, sound investment opportunities, the added perk of easy tax evasion. And the U.S. has been on the chase ever since. In recent months,...

Statement by Mr. Håkon Golbrandsen, the Norwegian State Secretary for International Development, at the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development in New York.

I once heard that “Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it disappears.” The truth of this little phrase has buzzed in my mind over and over as I pass my days researching billions of disappearing dollars. And what, pray tell, do I mean by “disappearing dollars?” I’m talking about illicit financial flows (IFFs), which in 2006 were somewhere between $850 billion and $1 trillion dollars. IFFs are bundles of money that are sneaked out of low-income countries illegally (and usually wind up in the developed world). This is not...