2025: The year tax justice became part of the world’s problem-solving infrastructure

As 2025 draws to a close, tax justice is no longer just a political demand. It has become part of the core problem-solving infrastructure that governments and movements rely on to confront climate breakdown, debt distress, inequality and democratic strain. From climate finance and public services to gendered austerity and the fight for accountability, tax justice now sits at the centre of the defining challenges of our time.

This was also the year a second Trump administration sought to roll back the global minimum tax and retreat from multilateral cooperation, even as countries at the United Nations continued negotiating a new framework convention on international tax cooperation. At the same time, the climate emergency accelerated, while many governments still failed to resource a just transition at the scale required.

Amid these pressures, 2025 was marked by a historic breakthrough: for the first time ever, every government sat at the same negotiating table to begin shaping global tax rules through a UN convention, a milestone a century in the making.

Within this shifting global context, the tax justice movement, and the Tax Justice Network in particular, made important strides: deepening our data and research, connecting climate and tax justice more firmly, and supporting allies to defend human rights in the face of secrecy and tax abuse.

Here are some of the key moments that defined our work in 2025.

1. Data that shifts power

In 2025 we significantly expanded both the quality and reach of our research.

A central focus was our shift towards tax administrative data as a core pillar of our evidence base. We continued our collaborations with tax authorities in Nigeria, Uganda, Slovakia and Czechia, and began new work in South Africa, Kenya, Greece, Ghana, Portugal, Norway, Ethiopia, Zambia and Rwanda. These partnerships are helping tax administrations use their own micro-data to identify profit shifting, illicit financial flows and tax abuse, and to design more effective responses.

Building on this experience, we have been preparing to launch Admin Data for Tax Justice, a new initiative that will bring together researchers and tax authorities to codify best practice on secure-room access, data preparation and joint analytical work. The initiative will have its own website, admindata.taxjustice.net, including a searchable database of research projects that use administrative data to study tax abuse. An in-person workshop in Prague in December kicks off a series of events planned for 2026 to share lessons across countries.

We also made substantial progress in developing methods to quantify profit shifting and offshore-related illicit financial flows using micro-level datasets. New analyses this year drew on country by country reporting data, examined the effects of transparency reforms, and explored how recent measures such as windfall taxes and wealth taxes change behaviour.

These methodological advances will feed into an updated Illicit Financial Flows Tracker to be launched in 2026. They already strengthened our ability to provide independent, data-driven assessments of tax abuse practices and to support reform proposals at UN and EU level.

In November, we published the State of Tax Justice 2025, our annual assessment of how much tax revenue countries lose each year due to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals using tax havens to underpay tax. This year’s report also highlights the harmful impacts of keeping country by country reporting data out of the public eye, at a time when public scrutiny is more important than ever.

2. Beneficial ownership and the fight over secrecy

Beneficial ownership transparency remained a core battleground in 2025.

Early in the year we published Asset beneficial ownership – Enforcing wealth tax and other positive spillover effects, which sets out what a robust approach to beneficial ownership of assets would look like. The report explains how asset-level beneficial ownership rules, going beyond companies alone, are critical to enforcing wealth taxes and supporting asset recovery. The approach aligns with the IMF’s 2025 work on sectoral beneficial ownership, which we reviewed. Both papers were presented at a panel co-organised by the Tax Justice Network during the Civil Society Public Forum at the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings.

The Financial Secrecy Index 2025 update captured the sharp deterioration in public access to beneficial ownership information following the 2022 European Court of Justice ruling that restricted public access to registers. Our assessment tracks where governments are closing off transparency and where they are still moving ahead, despite legal and political pushback.

3. Using secrecy data to tackle financial crime

This year also showed how tax justice data is becoming part of the core toolkit for regulators, investigators and compliance professionals.

New research published in May demonstrated how Financial Secrecy Index risk scores can be combined with minimal transaction data to build functional, transaction-level risk scores for illicit financial flows. We applied this Financial Secrecy Index-based scoring to leaked suspicious transaction reports revealed in the FinCEN Files investigation to show the added value of robust geographic risk mapping on a large set of real-world transactions. The work features as a chapter in the final book from the EU-funded TRACE project, which over four years developed new technologies for financial crime investigations.

The same methodology can help financial intelligence units and law enforcement prioritise large backlogs of suspicious transaction reports by turning heterogeneous data into a ranked list of higher-risk cases.

Major banks, financial technology firms and compliance teams are increasingly integrating Financial Secrecy Index indicators and other Tax Justice Network data into their country risk classifications, automated anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist financing models, and tax evasion risk flags. Transactions and clients linked to high-secrecy jurisdictions are being more systematically scored and escalated, and our data is reportedly used in customer due-diligence checks.

The growing interest in our risk data from criminology experts and public authorities was highlighted at the launch of the 2025–26 scientific season at the International Centre for Comparative Criminology in Montréal, where practical uses of our data in investigative work were presented. Our geographic risk methodologies were also presented in November to the European Commission’s directorate responsible for financial stability and financial regulation (DG FISMA), followed by further sessions with anti-money laundering practitioner audiences in Germany. 

Beyond individual institutions, our Financial Secrecy Index scores now feed into a range of widely used global risk assessment tools, including the Basel index on anti-money laundering risks (Basel AML Index), the Risk-Informed Financial Flows tool (RIFF), and the Global Risk Assessment system (GRAS). These tools guide both supervisory risk assessments and private-sector compliance processes and help embed tax justice indicators in the wider ecosystem that works to combat financial crime.

4. Exposing corporate tax havenry

The Corporate Tax Haven Index remained central to our work on corporate tax abuse.

The latest index findings show that countries are giving multinational corporations an average 63 per cent tax discount on profits generated from intellectual property. That is proportionally equivalent to allowing workers to pay no income tax for seven months of the year.

Countries offering these intellectual property tax breaks are giving away at least US$29 billion of their own tax revenue each year. They also cost other countries around US$84 billion in annual tax losses as multinationals respond to the discount by shifting profits out of the countries where they carry out real economic activity.

We also renewed our website this year, making it easier for journalists, policymakers and campaigners to explore the Corporate Tax Haven Index, the Financial Secrecy Index and other tools, and to connect the dots between corporate tax abuse, secrecy and public underfunding.

5. Reasserting tax sovereignty for climate justice

2025 cemented the link between tax justice and climate justice in both research and advocacy.

Our report Reclaiming tax sovereignty to transform global climate finance set out how countries can use fair taxing rights, progressive tax measures and stronger cooperation to raise at least US$1.3 trillion a year in climate finance. The report received strong endorsement across movements and wide media uptake, including at COP30 in Belém.

Building on this, we co-organised A Climate for Change: Towards Just Taxation for Climate Finance, a two-day conference in October hosted by the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Campinas, Brazil. The event took place just weeks before COP30 and during the first year of negotiations towards a UN tax convention, at a moment when both climate and tax systems are under intense pressure.

More than 250 delegates from advocacy, policy, research and grassroots organisations joined the conference in person, with many more online. Together they explored why connecting climate and tax is essential for a just transition and how to design climate finance tools that are grounded in equity and tax justice.

Keynotes and panels featured voices from across regions and disciplines, including Rodrigo Orair, Director of the Extraordinary Secretariat for Tax Reform at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance; Elisa Morgera, UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights; José Antonio Ocampo, Chair of the UN Committee for Development Policy and Chair of ICRICT; and Sabrina Fernandes, Head of Research at the Alameda Institute and Senior Research Advisor at Oxford University’s TIDE Centre. All conference papers and videos are available online and will continue to inform joint work across the tax and climate movements.

6. A century in the making: the historic breakthrough for global tax justice

2025 marked the biggest breakthrough in the history of tax justice: for the first time ever, every country in the world sat at the same table to negotiate international tax rules. This moment has been a century in the making, and represents a direct reversal of the exclusionary processes that shaped today’s tax architecture.

It follows a long lineage of turning points: the League of Nations allowing imperial powers to design global rules; the creation of the OECD to prevent UN leadership on tax; the Zedillo report’s call for a globally inclusive tax body; and two decades of civil society advocacy — including the Tax Justice Network’s early insistence that the UN was the only legitimate forum for global tax rule-setting. The African Union and UN Economic Commission for Africa’s High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows reaffirmed this need, and African finance ministers’ call in 2022 pushed the demand into the UN General Assembly process.

Nothing is guaranteed. The first year of negotiations has moved quickly, and the next eighteen months will determine the future of international tax rules. This opportunity may not come again for generations.

One factor shaping the talks is the self-imposed absence of the United States. The State of Tax Justice 2025 shows that US multinationals are now the most aggressive tax abusers globally, while the country sits at the top of the Financial Secrecy Index. Threats of retaliation against governments seeking fair taxation have clarified the choice: either move forward collectively through a UN convention, or allow a narrow group of economic powers to continue dictating the rules.

7. Defending human rights and shaping the UN tax convention

Throughout 2025, we worked with partners across the tax justice, climate and human rights movements to shape a unified civil society position on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

We contributed presentations and substantive input to coordination spaces for the climate and human rights movements, including an event hosted by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva in July, and regular calls with climate–tax allies.

The Tax Justice Network submitted detailed contributions to each of the three UN workstreams on the framework convention in August (see Workstream 1, Workstream 2 and Workstream 3), with further submissions to workstreams 1 and 3 to be made accessible on the UN DESA website. To support broader engagement, we also developed a dedicated UN tax convention hub where civil society organisations, policymakers and the wider public can follow the development of the convention, explore the substantive issues under negotiation, and track analysis as intergovernmental discussions evolve.

Alongside this, we continued to foreground the human rights impacts of tax abuse and governance failures. We developed a range of tools and resources to strengthen understanding of the links between tax, rights and accountability, including a video and briefing exploring how multinational corporations’ tax practices affect human rights. We also contributed to reports from the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR) that examine the human rights impacts of tax abuse, and through the TaxEd Alliance we deepened our collaboration on financing education.

2025 was also a year of introspection for the Tax Justice Network. As a network founded in the global North, we invited leading thinkers to challenge us on post-colonial power, reparations and our own role in the global movement. We also brought a tax justice lens, belatedly, to the context of the genocide against Palestinians.

8. Podcasts that tell the stories behind the numbers

Our podcast family expanded its reach and relevance in 2025, bringing tax justice debates into living rooms, classrooms and commute playlists around the world.

Across all shows, one key theme was the regional fallout from President Trump’s tariffs, the US withdrawal from the OECD global minimum tax deal and the formal announcement that the US would no longer participate in UN negotiations for a new global tax convention. Producers examined what these decisions mean for tax sovereignty, multilateralism and the global balance of power.

On The Taxcast (our English-language show), highlights included:

• A focus on the “on again, off again” Corporate Transparency Act, which now exempts entities created in the US and their beneficial owners from reporting requirements.
  
• A feature on the weaponising of tax rules against immigrants in the United States.
  
• A conversation with Panama Papers journalists Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer on press freedom under threat in Switzerland, their investigations into one of the world’s most dangerous arms dealers, and what this reveals about global financial secrecy.
  
• An investigation into Guernsey’s role in helping relatives of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launder money.
  
• A visit to communities in the north of England to see the social reuse of seized assets in practice.
  

In 2025 we also ran a six-part monthly series, Unequal India Decoded, which:

• Reported from the UN’s fourth Financing for Development conference in Spain.
  
• Unpacked claims that India has become both the world’s fourth largest economy and the fourth most equal.
  
• Explored who really benefits from sales tax reforms.
  
• Looked at the potential for BRICS+ countries to change the course of history and how just taxation can help fund climate action.
  
• Told a people’s history of colonialism and tax justice through the Story of the Rupee.
  

Looking ahead, Series Two of our weekly podcast The Corruption Diaries will start in 2026. This time we follow the story of a music lover who ran a record label, toured with bands like Porcupine Tree, and then unexpectedly became a campaigner taking on tax dodgers and the authorities in the UK from his garden shed. Like all our podcasts, it is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Our regional language podcasts continued to grow:

• Justicia Impositiva (Spanish) covered elections across Latin America, the government of Javier Milei and US support for his programme in Argentina, tax injustice and crisis in Panama, Generation Z protests in Peru, elections in Ecuador, Bolivia’s new president, Mexico’s economic policy, the rise of China and a mini-series on judicial reform.
  
• الجباية ببساطة (Arabic) examined sovereign debt sustainability and tax reform in the Middle East and North Africa, customs duties on imported mobile phones in Egypt, tax reform debates in Lebanon, Tunisia’s 2025 Finance Law, the 2025 Financial Secrecy Index findings and austerity politics in the region.
  
• É Da Sua Conta (Portuguese) focused on tax and racial and gender justice, health rights, the 2025 Financial Secrecy Index, the role of the US in global tax injustice via Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the State of Tax Justice findings and the role of BRICS countries in pushing for tax justice and Brazilian tax reform.
  
• Impôts et Justice Sociale (French) covered African tax sovereignty, tax justice and a fair green transition, the implications of the 2025 Financial Secrecy Index for Africa, progress on UN tax convention negotiations led by the Africa Group, the Binance scandal in Nigeria and how tax saves lives.
  

Across all languages, our podcasts continue to show that tax justice is not just about numbers. It is about power, democracy and the everyday lives behind the statistics.

9.  Strengthening the infrastructure that powers our data 

With pro bono legal support through TrustLaw at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and in partnership with an exceptional lawyer, we strengthened and modernised our data licensing framework. The updated system provides clearer terms and improved consistency. It also offers more robust protections for everyone who uses our data for research, media work or anti-money-laundering and risk-analysis purposes. These improvements support the long-term sustainability of the Tax Justice Network’s Data Portal.

We also completed the transition to rolling update cycles for all our indices. These smaller and more frequent releases help build momentum around our research outputs. They also provide a regularly updated resource for everyone who relies on our data, including students, researchers, journalists writing on tax justice, and private companies and international institutions working on risk profiling.

Looking ahead: building the future we need

If 2025 was a turbulent year for tax and climate governance, it was also a year in which the tax justice movement showed its ability to adapt and lead. It was a year marked not only by historic breakthroughs in global tax cooperation, but also by rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and horrific levels of violence against civilian populations. These overlapping crises remind us that tax, power and accountability are inseparable from wider struggles for justice.

In this context, the work of the Tax Justice Network took on new urgency. Our advances in data and methodology were not just technical achievements. They were part of a wider effort to support governments and communities to uncover illicit flows, challenge secrecy and strengthen public oversight. At the same time, our alliances across climate, education and human rights movements helped to push the debate toward systemic change and widen the circle of actors shaping tax justice.

The coming negotiations on the UN tax convention, unfolding amid major shifts in global politics and finance, will test governments’ willingness to cooperate. They also present a genuine opportunity to secure the structural reforms that movements have demanded for decades.

We will keep working with partners around the world to build tax systems that serve the public interest, knowing that tax remains one of our strongest social superpowers.

See you in 2026.

Donate to Tax Justice Network

We rely on donations from people like you who value our research and campaigning to keep our work going. Help us do more work like the work above with a donation.