Financial Transparency Coalition

In an opinion piece that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald, Alvin Mosioma of the Tax Justice Network - Africa, Subrat Das of the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, and Oriana Suarez of the Latin American Network on Debt, Development, and Rights called on the G20 Finance Ministers to act on a number of vital financial transparency issues. The ministers will meet this weekend in Australia, ahead of November's Leaders Summit. The article focused on the need to address all aspects of financial transparency, including beneficial ownership, automatic information exchange, and public country-by-country reporting.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) new recommendations to fight multinational corporate tax avoidance look robust from the onset, but there’s something missing. Since the most vital reporting information will remain out of the reach of ordinary citizens, the recommendations don’t do enough to bring transparency to a global financial system badly in need of it. The OECD’s project on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) is intended to crack down on the ability of corporations to move profits overseas, through mis-invoicing trade transactions to avoid taxes and other dubious practices. With nearly a trillion...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is moving towards implementing a new tool for catching tax evaders: automatic exchange of financial information (AEOI). While the name might sound a bit confusing, the idea is pretty simple. Governments in the system will share financial information with each other at designated intervals, enabling authorities to find individuals and corporations that are stashing assets in foreign countries to evade taxes. While it’s a welcome initiative, we have serious concerns about the OECD's efforts thus far to include developing countries. Developing countries are some of the hardest hit by tax evasion and...

This week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released the full version of its new standard for automatic tax information exchange. Under the standard, governments would collect data from financial institutions on investment income, financial assets, and account balances paid to non-resident accountholders. On an annual basis, participating governments would exchange that information automatically with other jurisdictions. In a statement, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said the launch “moves us closer to a world in which tax cheats have nowhere left to hide.” This impetus for this new standard came from a mandate by G20 nations and the OECD...