Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity today applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for working with over fifty jurisdictions to establish agreements enabling the bilateral automatic exchange of tax information as part of the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

There’s very little our lawmakers won’t do to show their patriotism. And this week Senator Marco Rubio took the prize when he introduced a bill that would exempt American winners of Olympic medals from federal taxes on their cash prizes. In case you haven’t heard yet: when an Olympian wins a gold, silver, or bronze medal, he or she receives a cash prize of $25,000, $15,000, or $10,000, respectively. At the moment, Olympians pay taxes on those prizes just as they would on any other income. Under the Olympic Tax Elimination Act, they would not. As someone who was once an...

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...

Aside from the empty seats, the big scandal of the Olympics so far has been the disqualification of eight badminton players for deliberately losing their matches. What’s that got to do with tax justice? Well since you ask…