Financial Transparency Coalition

David Spencer, a Senior Advisor to the Tax Justice Network, has just delivered a hard-hitting speech at a major United Nations meeting on transfer pricing, an arcane-sounding but extraordinarily important issue in the field of international tax. Spencer's speech is here. It is an outspoken document, couched in diplomatic language, which contains too much important stuff for us to summarise in detail on this blog - so here is a short summary. Read the whole document for the full effect. Companies can manipulate their internal trade ("transfer") prices...

For many years economists and policy makers have taken issue with GDP as a measure of national wealth. Statistics like these tend to over-emphasize certain elements of wealth and under-estimate others. Economists often point to the fact that, for example, income generated from the sales of cigarettes is included in GDP (something which might actually have negative value) while value generated from a stay-at-home-mom (or dad) is not. As I’ve noted, there are problems with other economic indicators like the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the unemployment rate, and the traditional measure of Illicit Financial Flows—all of which are used...

ISTANBUL – State Secretary Ingrid Fiskaa spoke at the Fourth UN Conference on the LDCs, identifying illicit financial flows due to trade mispricing, tax evasion, trafficking, the drugs and arms trade, and corruption as one of the structural causes of poverty as well as one of the major threats facing sustainable development, along with climate change, armed conflicts, and a lack of political and economic empowerment for women and girls.

Rarely have developing countries been more vocal and united on a question of international taxation. The vexed question of the status of the arcane-sounding “Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters” is hotting up, after rich and poor countries clashed at a United Nations meeting last month. The UN tax committee is charged with promoting international cooperation to deal with important issues such as taxing multinational companies across borders, and sharing best practice between countries. It has a specific mandate to take into account the specific needs of developing countries, which is why developing countries want to see...