Event description
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) impose substantial fiscal, governance, and development costs, yet remain stubbornly hard to measure. Dominant flow-based estimation techniques are constrained by the level of aggregation at which trade, investment, and banking data are publicly available, and rarely identify the actors, channels, or jurisdictions driving risk in a given country. A complementary research programme has emerged over the past decade that combines regulatory risk indicators (banking secrecy, beneficial ownership opacity, corporate tax haven characteristics) with bilateral economic data to produce country-specific vulnerability assessments, and that exploits large-scale micro-data such as corporate ownership registries, leaks, sanctions lists, and country-by-country reports to reconstruct the stocks and structures through which illicit flows are routed. Recent work has begun to integrate these strands, opening the prospect of ultimate-actor-level assessments of IFF risk across foreign direct investment, trade, banking, and portfolio investment.
This webinar presents results from the project A Dynamic Global Dashboard of Illicit Finance Vulnerabilities, which has produced new methods and datasets for mapping the pathways, actors, and structural risks that underpin IFFs. The project responds to a long-standing limitation in the IFF literature: most existing estimates lack the granularity required to identify which channels, partners, and ultimate actors generate the bulk of risk in a given country, and therefore cannot reliably inform the allocation of audit, investigative, or regulatory resources.
The Tax Justice Network will present their new Illicit Financial Flows tracker, an online tool that maps tax-related IFFs and proposes policy solutions with their estimated effects. Professor Daniel Haberly, University of Sussex, will present his research identifying key countries and actor nationalities involved in global illicit financial flows. Our next speaker will reflect on African priorities relating to IFFs, and there will be a discussion on UK threats and opportunities by Josie Faulkner, Latimer Network, Joffe Trust, followed by a Q&A with the presenters.
This webinar brings together research, civil society, media, and policy at a timely moment, when the opportunity for reform is greater than ever. The UN is negotiating their Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, with terms of reference committing to addressing tax-related illicit financial flows. For the first time, there is a forum where every country has a say in negotiating international tax rules. The final convention text is due in 2027.