Financial Transparency Coalition

In the United States, the overall noncompliance rate for all federal taxes and individual income taxes stands at about 14 percent. According to studies by the Taxpayer Compliance Research Program and the National Research Program, about 1 percent of wages and salaries are underreported and about 4 percent of taxable interest and dividends are misreported. A study of Germany found that the corporate tax base would have increased by 14% if no income-shifting had occurred. Developing countries lose about $900 billion in illicit outflows per year, which severely undermines these nations' abilities to effectively raise revenue. These activities are...

It all started last month when Walgreens, the iconic American pharmacy chain, announced that it would move its headquarters to Switzerland as part of a merger with the European chain Alliance Boots. The move, known as an “inversion”, essentially involves a company merging with another company that is based in a jurisdiction with lower taxes. Once they merge, the newly formed group will usually move its headquarters to the lower tax jurisdiction to avoid paying taxes in their home country. However, this move is usually a pure technicality, meaning that while the...

Last week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced that it had received troves of data on a number of wealthy UK individuals that held money in an offshore bank in the Channel Isles, a British crown dependency and well known tax haven. The ICIJ, along with The Guardian newspaper, dissected the documents, and released a number of stories outlining some of their findings. One of the more interesting tax arrangements uncovered seems to be that of the owners of Nando's, the worldwide restaurant chain famous for its chicken dishes.

If you're anything like me, you may have spent an hour waiting in line at the U.S. post office yesterday. I realize I'm a blogger, and a graduate student, and in my twenties -- and all of these factors made me rather unlike the typical pen-and-paper-tax-filer -- but there's just something so satisfying about addressing an envelope (and sometimes a check) to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.