Our strategic framework - Tax Justice Network

Every second,
we lose a nurse’s salary to a tax haven.

We at the Tax Justice Network believe tax is our most powerful tool for creating just societies that gives equal weight to the needs of everyone. Under pressure from corporate giants and the superrich, our governments have programmed our tax systems to prioritise the wealthiest over everybody else. This fuels inequality, weakens economies and undermines democracy

Every day, we inspire and equip people and governments everywhere to reprogramme their tax systems to work for everyone.

20 years of tax justice and beyond

The Tax Justice Network’s Beyond20 strategy was adopted in 2023 on our 20th anniversary, bringing together two decades of development in our thinking and learning from our participation in the global movement for economic, social and climate justice.

The Tax Justice Network was formally established in 2003 as a network of engaged activists and experts, with a secretariat based in the UK. Over time, the organisation has grown, with members of the extended team spread around the world.

In the 20 years since, we have:

– Catalysed a global tax justice movement

– Created a suite of internationally known outputs

– Shifted public and policymaker narratives around key debates

– Normalised and achieved a set of significant policy and institutional changes at the global level.

Read the independent assessment of our 20 years of work.

Vision

Our vision is of a world in which all people can enjoy the full benefits of tax justice. Tax is a social superpower. Tax generates revenues to fund public services and effective states more broadly. Tax provides the main means of redistribution to eliminate harmful inequalities. Tax is the glue in the social contract, that underpins inclusive political representation. Together, these channels make tax crucial to how we organise ourselves as societies, instead of living nasty, solitary, short, brutish lives alone. Tax justice creates the potential for well-funded states that deliver for us all.

Mission

Our mission is to contribute to creating the conditions for achieving tax justice by challenging false narratives, and normalising bold, progressive proposals. Our role is to provide consistent, credible research and analysis of tax abuse and the necessary responses, disseminated globally through a powerful communications platform and through international advocacy in close collaboration with the wider movement.

Values

Our values underpin our work and inform our decision-making.

We seek to act with:

Humility. We aim to collaborate with and provide a platform for others, especially from the global South. We give importance to providing support for other organisations in the ecosystem, including to obtain profile and funding. We recognise the expertise and experience of others, including in the global movement. We seek out and draw on expertise from different areas of tax and financial analysis. We actively seek challenge to our approaches and assumptions. We recognise and reject the long history of the dominance of the global North in ‘knowledge production’ and extractive practices in appropriation of knowledge from elsewhere.

Integrity. We are honest and open about our finances, our decisions and actions, and their consequences.

We strive to be:

Just. We act fairly. We recognise the structural and overlapping inequalities that characterise the world and our societies. We aim to challenge these within the organisation as well as externally, and not to reproduce them through our own behaviours and practice. We recognise our individual privilege in multiple aspects, and our organisational privilege as an established global North NGO. We seek to act in solidarity with allies and partners from across the global movement for social justice, and never to impose our perspective.

Reflective. We weigh the implications of decisions and actions in advance. We look back to learn from those we have taken. We are open to challenge and to criticism.

Bold. We say what is right, not what is easy. We do not take extreme positions for the sake of it; but nor do we shy away from positions that make those in power uncomfortable. Only by being bold can we shift conventional paradigms in the pursuit of a better world for all.

Our policy platform

Our policy platform is summarised as the ABC DEFG₃ of tax justice:

The “ABC” of tax transparency
Automatic information exchange; Beneficial ownership transparency through public registers for companies, trusts and other legal vehicles; and public Country by country reporting for multinationals.

The “DE” of domestic measures
Disclosure of sufficient public data, and Enforcement by well-resourced and operationally independent tax authorities. These are measures to ensure the ABCs of tax transparency results in effective accountability.

The FG₂ of international elements
Formulary apportionment with unitary taxation, to end corporate tax abuse by ensuring that profits are taxed in the location of the real, underlying economic activity; Governance reform, centred on the establishment of a genuinely, globally inclusive process for the setting of tax rules and standards, under UN auspices; and a Global asset register (GAR), to connect and broaden the range of beneficial ownership registers across all legal vehicles and high-value assets, across jurisdictions, to provide a critical tool against abuse of tax, regulations and sanctions.

The G₃ of good taxes
Good taxes – a catch-all covering a progressive and effective overall tax system, and significant individual components of the tax justice agenda including wealth taxes, climate related tax measures, excess profits taxes and minimum effective tax rates.

Originally regarded as blindly utopian and unrealistic, it took just ten years for the ABC of tax transparency to come to form the basis for the global policy agenda when it was largely adopted in principle by the G8 and G20 groups of countries. But a further ten years on, in 2023, there is a great deal still to be done. Maintaining public pressure for transparency, primarily in the North, is crucial. Genuinely
inclusive global reforms remain an aspiration, and of course the agenda for tax justice is much broader than transparency alone.

Read our full strategy document for a detailed account of the progress made on each element of our policy platform and the work that remains ahead.

2025 update

We identify three significant changes to the context within which our strategy was designed:

Progress towards the key goal of the UN framework convention has continued to outpace expectations, with a full text scheduled to go to the General Assembly in 2027.
There has been a serious challenge to attitudes to multilateralism and international norms and standards, including large-scale conflicts conducted in open violation of international law and human rights commitments, and a sharp reversal of official aid commitments.
Finally, the United States’ slide into authoritarian corruption has thrown many assumptions in the air, with threats ranging from the stability of international trade conditions to civil society space and assumptions of equal rights, including those of racialised minorities.

While expecting to retain the existing strategy until at least 2028, we identify three particular points of focus:

– Support to civil society and to delegates in the UN negotiations

– Broadening the movement, including by working to bring climate and human rights organisations fully in

– Shifting the public narratives, specifically in support of inclusive multilateralism at this time of threat

To this end, we are also committed to seeking to build the financial resources available to support the movement, even – or rather, because of – the funding pressures that have come to a head over the last three years.

Every second, we lose a nurse’s salary to a tax haven.