Financial Transparency Coalition

Publish What You Pay and Eurodad have launched a briefing paper (PDF) calling on the EU to propose legally binding measures to require natural resource companies to publish key financial information for each country and project in which they operate. In recent months, civil society groups working on financial transparency and on tax and development have actively engaged the European Commission and other European institutions responsible for drafting key legislative and non-legislative proposals that will potentially reform European financial reporting standards. This paper aims to contribute to the current debate...

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...

The Monetary Affairs Committee of the EU Parliament has sent the following letter to the European Commission:

Mr Michel Barnier Commissioner for Internal Market and Services European Commission Rue de la Loi 200 B-1049 Brussels 25 May 2011 Country by Country Reporting Dear Commissioner Barnier We wanted to thank you for taking the time to meet with some of us last week in Strasbourg and for your continued positive engagement on country-by-country reporting and your public commitment to come forward with legislative proposals later this year . Before those proposals are published, we would like to reiterate a few key points from our meeting which we hope...

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Treasury Department will hold a hearing tomorrow on a proposed rule requiring banks to report information to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on bank accounts held by non-U.S. residents. Currently, U.S. banks are not required to give the U.S. government information about these types of accounts.