Financial Transparency Coalition

LONDON – The Prime Minister’s backing for tax justice throughout the world won a delighted welcome today from Christian Aid, which has a longstanding campaign against multinationals’ tax dodging.

Global Financial Integrity's new report, Illicit Financial Flows from China and the Role of Trade Misinvoicing, was released yesterday. It found that China lost $3.79 trillion--an astonishingly high number--between 2000 and 2011 to illicit financial flows. In just 2011, China lost almost $600 billion. These outflows are the proceeds of crime, corruption, and tax evasion, and threaten Chinese social stability. The report first debuted exclusively in this week's issue of The Economist.

TJN today publishes new research into banks’ and Big 4 accounting firms’ global geographical reach and presence. Using data from our Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) project, our research finds a positive correlation between the number of banks and the Big 4 firms of accountants in a jurisdiction, on the one hand, and the jurisdiction’s degree

DG TAXUD, the taxation and customs department of the EU civil service, is working on a strategy on tax havens and unfair tax competition to be released in the last quarter of the year. This is an extremely welcome step, as the communication addresses several key issues. It recognises that not only double taxation but also double non-taxation is a problem when working out how to tax cross border wealth and income; proposes the introduction of automatic information exchange at EU level; and explores several concrete measures against non-cooperative tax jurisdictions and aggressive tax planning. However, in many ways...