Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity’s Legal Counsel and Director of Government Affairs, Heather Lowe, will deliver remarks at the Brazilian Council of Economic and Social Development’s International Seminar on Fiscal Justice on Wednesday, August 10, 2011. Ms. Lowe’s remarks will be part of the seminar’s fiscal policy, productivity and competitiveness panel.

Hillary Clinton made an extraordinary speech to the OECD on aid today. It went far beyond anything I might have expected. The whole thing is here. The important highlights are as follows, in my opinion:

There are many urgent issues we could discuss today, but I want to focus on two. First, partnering with developing countries on reforms in three interconnected areas – taxes, transparency, and corruption – because focusing on these three will give us the tools needed to enable more countries to fund more of their own development. And second, doing more to support women as...

Last week at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, the African branch of Task Force coordinating committee member Tax Justice Network, Tax Justice Network - Africa (TJN-Africa), released the African edition of Tax Us If You Can. As Dereje Alemayehu, chair of Tax Justice Network's African Steering Committee, put it in a blog last week from Dakar:

This report is a clarion call to civil society and governments across Africa to stand up against the injustice of those who dodge taxes, and the response from those attending the launch was clear: this is an injustice we can no longer...

For some time we have been mooting the idea of creating a new organisation dedicated to assisting the governments of low-income countries through provision of expertise in tax policies and tax administration. We have provisionally given this organisation the working title of Tax Advisers Without Borders, echoing the incredible achievement of Medecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). We see this as an important component of the tax justice agenda. We think there are many recently retired tax officials and practitioners who would welcome the opportunity to use their expertise in a truly constructive way. One of our supporters, a very...