Financial Transparency Coalition

TJN has repeatedly reported about Switzerland’s devious strategy of breaking the European Union’s thrust for a functioning system of automatic information exchange. The Swiss Finance Ministry, in conjunction with its banks, deployed a strategy to fence off the dawning end of financial secrecy, called the “final withholding tax”. It is designed to preserve banking secrecy while buying off noise-making foreign governments through the transfer of a final tax on foreign citizens’ financial account’s income (details here). The German-language Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger reported on spokespersons of the German and Swiss Finance Ministries signalling their willingness to soon...

Recently we wrote a blog, entitled "Jeffrey Sachs joins the tax justice movement, sort of," after he wrote some superb (but incomplete) things in the Financial Times about the race to the bottom on corporate tax. Well, now he has a new piece on Project Syndicate, to which we have already briefly linked, but which is worth expanding on. It's entitled The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave, and it's excellent, all the way through. We are particularly excited by this section:

"We will need to light the dark corners of international finance, especially tax havens like the Cayman Islands and...

James R. Hines Jr., a professor at the University of Michigan who is routinely wheeled out by the tax havens as an academic apologist for their activities, has written an academic article entitled “Treasure Islands” which contains an elementary, fundamental error in the very first paragraph:

“Tax havens are small: most are islands; all but a few have populations below one million.”

If Hines has spent any time studying the offshore phenomenon, then he will know very well that the world’s biggest tax havens (or secrecy jurisdictions) — those that offer tax haven services – are large OECD economies or their...

Tax havens have gotten a lot of press lately. In Britain, the UK Uncut movement has mounted demonstrations across the country against tax dodging by large corporations and wealthy individuals – making the connection between profits parked abroad and deficits and budget cuts at home. Last month in the U.S., The New York Times revealed that GE, one of the nation’s largest companies, earned 46% of its revenue in the U.S. over the last three years but booked less than one-fifth of its profits there, shifting most of its booked profits to low-tax countries. In 2010,...