Financial Transparency Coalition

An article the other week in the Ugandan Daily Monitor quotes an official from the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), Mr. Patrick Mukiibi, on the value and implications of illicit flows from that country. According to the article, Uganda loses UGX 2 trillion (approx. USD 866 million) annually through “tax crime”, also termed “economic and tax fraud”. The Ugandan Ministry of Finance says that the current fiscal year (2010/2011) government budget is UGX 7.5 trillion (approx. USD 3.2 billion), and it will need loans and other development assistance to cover 26 percent of this. In other words, the article...

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity (GFI) joined a coalition of professional and civil society organizations calling upon the Senate Judiciary Committee to support a provision in S. 23, The Patent Reform Act of 2011, which will eliminate tax strategy patents today.

The Financial Times is running an editorial today entitled a taxing world which is mostly very good. First, though, after a brief exploration of the UK Uncut phenomenon ("the group has a point") there is something we’d disagree with. The FT says this:

Tax avoidance is legal and legitimate. Unlike tax evasion, it is not obviously immoral to exploit the tax code to pay the least that is legally required.

It is up to government to plug the leaks, the FT said. No. For starters, as we constantly argue, what is legal is not necessarily what...

A few weeks ago ten activists, mostly in their twenties, met in the Nag's Head pub in North London and started to discuss protesting against severe austerity measures being implemented by Britain's coalition govermnent. Instead of protesting simply against cuts, they thought it would be more interesting to launch a strike against tax-dodging  multinational corporations. Building on analyses of the UK's so-called Tax Gap, a subject where the Tax Justice Network's Senior Adviser Richard Murphy has been especially influential, the young activists could see this was a clear and coherent alternative to the government's austerity programme. The group called...