Financial Transparency Coalition

Felix Salmon responded in a thoughtful post to a variety of news stories yesterday. This paragraph, referring to estimates of the total value of assets located in tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, caught my eye:

Beyond enabling tax dodging, tax haven secrecy facilitates transnational crime, financial fraud and international terrorism, writes Robert Morgenthau, the legendary former Manhattan District Attorney, in the New York Times.

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.”

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.