Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

ISTANBUL – State Secretary Ingrid Fiskaa spoke at the Fourth UN Conference on the LDCs, identifying illicit financial flows due to trade mispricing, tax evasion, trafficking, the drugs and arms trade, and corruption as one of the structural causes of poverty as well as one of the major threats facing sustainable development, along with climate change, armed conflicts, and a lack of political and economic empowerment for women and girls.

The European presidency has just issued a note advocating a push to increase financial transparency in Europe through its Savings Tax Directive. As they say:

"The Presidency attaches crucial importance to gear up bilateral talks in order to reach political agreement upon the adoption of the Savings Tax Directive in the very near future."

Unsurprisingly, there are some rather large flies in this ointment. Austria and Luxembourg have long been holdouts on the European Savings Tax Directive, working hard behind...

You’ve heard the story before. A corporation with something to hide uses a tax haven as a host for its phony subsidiaries. In the classic tale, it is for the purposes of evading millions in taxes. Sometimes the corporation exploits the tax haven for other evils, like hiding losses from investors. My favorite example is Enron’s executives, who used shell corporations with snazzy names like “Raptor” and “JEDI” to hide losses and fabricate earnings—with disastrous results. But never before have I heard of companies using tax havens to win U.S. government contracts. That sentence sounds shady...