Financial Transparency Coalition

At the US Summit for Democracy in December 2021, the Biden administration made a series of ambitious policy commitments aimed at fighting corruption globally.

Washington DC – The UK should stop blocking attempts to implement a global minimum corporate tax that enables developing countries to raise much-needed funds for the Covid-19 response, according to the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC).

This blog post is the first in a two-part blog series. In this post, I observe several of the year’s biggest global trends and their relationship to financial transparency. In the second post, I will examine this year’s progress and momentum in global policy on transparency issues. Rising Income Inequality In the United States, policymakers across the political spectrum have become increasingly vocal about the rising income inequality. They include Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who called this the “issue of our time,” Senator Paul Rand (R- KY) who admitted income inequality is a problem, and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and...

This week the Treasury Department began assembling administrative options for deterring or preventing U.S. companies from inverting—or reorganizing overseas to avoid paying federal taxes. This move follows on the heels of a strong statement from President Obama who accused inverting firms of "cherry-picking the rules.” As he put it: "My attitude is I don't care if it's legal, it's wrong.” Particularly common among pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies, inversions are primarily a means for U.S. companies to avoid corporate taxes. In an inversion, a smaller foreign company “acquires” a large U.S. firm, allowing the domestic firm to...