Event description
The ability of people to hold wealth anonymously – from financial assets to real estate, or high-value art, yachts and aircraft – is central to the spiralling wealth inequality, corruption and tax abuse around the world. And as policymakers are being reminded since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, anonymous wealth is also the major hurdle to any sanctions being effective. But progress has been building towards an emerging international standard of requiring public beneficial ownership information for property and for companies, trusts and other legal vehicles.
The next step, once thought utopian, is to create a global asset registry to bring law and transparency to the trillions in wealth and assets anonymously held offshore. A global asset register would join up the range of information available on legal and beneficial owners and connects through with legal entity identifiers and personal tax identification numbers. With some data public and other information available only to tax authorities and law enforcement, the global asset registry offers the scope to protect privacy while ending financial secrecy, and provides the basis for taxing wealth more effectively and progressively.
This event will be delivered in partnership with the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), which has led work on proposals for global asset register and includes key proponents Prof Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, and with the Fight Inequality Alliance, the leading grassroots movement which has backed national wealth taxes all around the world.
This event is part of a series of online public events the Tax Justice Network is hosting that will discuss critical opportunities in 2022 to meet pressing global urgencies with global tax progress. The event series will bring together high-level policymakers, leading economists and renowned campaigners to discuss the most pivotal tax justice policy developments of 2022, how tax justice policies can be implemented and who should lead reform of the global tax system. Learn more about Tax Justice Series 2022 here.
