Financial Transparency Coalition

In 2009, leaders of the world’s 20 most powerful nations gave the impression that offshore tax evasion would no longer be tolerated. The London G20 threatened tax havens with economic sanctions unless they agreed to exchange bank information. High-level international pressure forced commitments from all tax havens to cooperate. The G20 declared: “the era of bank secrecy is over.”

This morning, Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and former top economic advisor to President Obama, wrote that European austerity is holding back economic growth, which is making their sovereign debt problem worse, both in individual countries passing austerity budgets and on a continent-wide basis.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once famously wrote that "taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society"—a notion implicitly acknowledged by each of us when we file our tax returns with the IRS every April. Yet civilized society, at home and abroad, is precariously at risk today unless we do something to stem the rampant tax dodging facilitated by tax havens.

With the €1 Trillion the EU governments lose each year to tax dodging at stake. The prospect of a debt ridden jobless future has EU the asking questions. DG TAXUD the tax arm of the EU civil service will prepare a communication by December on the broad topic of tax havens and unfair tax competition.