Financial Transparency Coalition

"Real patriots pay their fair share of taxes. They don’t run out on the bill," write Scott Klinger and Holly Sklar. Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday and they want you to pick up the tab. Actually, you already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States. There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by...

Two years ago an edition of Tax Justice Focus contained a lead article entitled Shadow Regulation and the Shadow Banking System: the role of the Dublin International Financial Services Centre. Written by Jim Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Trinity College, Dublin, it looked at the role in the global financial crisis played by the tax haven / secrecy jurisdiction of Ireland, and in particular the Dublin International Financial Services Centre (IFSC.) We added this to our Economic Crisis + Offshore webpage. Now we have just added to that same web page a major new article by...

WASHINGTON, DC – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and several other senators have introduced a bill to close offshore tax loopholes and strengthen offshore tax enforcement.

Most people know America is unequal. Many of us have heard the statistic that the richest 1% of Americans receives 24% of the nation’s income. This number looks big. It might even look huge. But if it doesn’t utterly shock you, you don’t really understand it. This graph illustrates inequality by lining up the incomes of the U.S. population along a football field with $100 bills.* The median U.S. family earns a stack of bills approximately 1.7 inches high—that’s $42,327 (this exercise assumes there are 250 bills in a 1 inch stack, which of course depends on whether or not...