Financial Transparency Coalition

The World Bank Group’s new policy on offshore financial centers will aim to improve the effectiveness of its private sector arm by helping countries tackle tax evasion but effective rules must be made for partner companies. As part of the World Bank Group, The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has a mission to promote development. The IFC uses public aid money, to fund private companies’ operations in poor countries, which should generate growth and increased government revenues. But reports by IBIS and Eurodad found these companies using tax havens, taking revenue from those countries that they are meant to benefit.

Publish What You Fund, one of the Task Force's Allied Organizations, has released their 2011 Pilot Aid Transparency Index. The index is relatively unique in that it looks at the donors, rather than the recipients, of aids, and ranks them by how transparent their giving process is. In all, they ranked 58 countries and institutions who collectively give billions of dollars of aid to the developing world.

Corruption thrives on secrecy, when undisturbed by public access to information about government and business activities. Countering it requires public participation and transparency in anti-corruption efforts and in governance. This is recognised in the UN Convention against Corruption in Article 13 on civil society participation and access to information and in other UNCAC provisions. Additionally, Article 19 and other provisions of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, provide for a right to freedom of expression and to access to information held by public bodies and calls on states of their own accord to put information of public interest...

We have had good press coverage for yesterday’s UK-Swiss tax deal analysis, which reveals how the UK government’s claims that it will net 4-7 billion pounds in tax revenues are fatally flawed. See, for example: Swiss-U.K. Tax Agreement May Be ‘Revenue-Negative,’ Group Says – Bloomberg Swiss tax deal could end up costing UK – Guardian