Financial Transparency Coalition

The lux leaks saga moved up a couple of gears last week. First of all, a large number of MEPs broke ranks with their leadership to publicly back a European Parliament committee of enquiry into the so-called ‘sweetheart deals’ that Luxembourg concluded with hundreds of multinational companies to minimise their tax bill. The Parliament’s political decision-making body, the Conference of Presidents, has yet to formally approve the enquiry but the genie seems to be well and truly out of the bottle now, even if there are reports that EPP deputies are being put under pressure to withdraw their signatures.  The enquiry...

The Deputy President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has issued some strong words against individuals and corporations funneling money out of the country to avoid taxes. Speaking at the National Council on Provinces, Ramaphosa called on citizens to report cases of tax evasion.

International aid organization, Oxfam, released a new report last Thursday claiming there are a number of flaws with the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development's (OECD) plan to implement global tax reforms. The project, known as the Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), attempts to address profit shifting, a process in which corporations move profits to subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions to avoid paying taxes where the profits were actually generated. Often, the countries in which the real profits were made are developing countries with higher corporate...

Every year, multinational corporations avoid billions of dollars in taxes globally by using abusive profit shifting to move revenue to tax havens and costs to jurisdictions where they actually do business. This is called transfer pricing, and is the biggest problem that the Task Force's Country-by-Country Reporting recommendation is designed to fix, by forcing publish exposure of where firms are reporting their figures. We're Not Broke, the documentary released last year on corporate tax avoidance and the movement to change it, is now available in segments on Youtube. And unlike our previous post on We're Not Broke, the segments are...