Financial Transparency Coalition

Today the OECD identified 15 policy action points and created a two-year timeline that it hopes will restore trust and fairness in what it concedes has become a flawed and discredited international tax system. The report, Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, recognises what the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC) has known for years: That the integrity of the current global tax system has been undermined by multinational companies and their tax planners exploiting the boundaries of acceptable tax planning.

The swashbuckling pirates of olde amassed private fortunes by raiding ships and stealing them. Once they captured a ship, they would replace its flag — which represented one of the world’s sovereign nations — with the Jolly Roger. By flying the skull and crossbones, pirates proclaimed that they were out for their own benefit and theirs alone. Many American corporations are following this pirate tradition. Their crews aren’t sword-wielding ruffians, but high-priced lobbyists and accountants. They fight for, win, and then exploit loopholes in the tax code that allow multinational corporations to take profits earned in the United States and...

Every year, multinational corporations avoid billions of dollars in taxes globally by using abusive profit shifting to move revenue to tax havens and costs to jurisdictions where they actually do business. This is called transfer pricing, and is the biggest problem that the Task Force's Country-by-Country Reporting recommendation is designed to fix, by forcing publish exposure of where firms are reporting their figures. We're Not Broke, the documentary released last year on corporate tax avoidance and the movement to change it, is now available in segments on Youtube. And unlike our previous post on We're Not Broke, the segments are...

In our newest report, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries 2001-2010, we look at illicit financial flows--the proceeds of crime, corruption, and tax evasion--leaving the developing world. Illicit financial flows are a type of capital flight, and have been a persistent plague on the developing world for some time now. Our new report will be released on Tuesday morning. But for today, I want to focus more narrowly on Zambia, one of the poorest nations on earth and one of the clearest examples of the damage caused by both illicit and licit capital flight.