We’re hiring again! Details below and download your job information pack here.
Please note – this is a separate researcher role from the one advertised on 18 January.
Key facts:
Application closing date: 5 March 2018
Start date: April 2018
Reports to: Director, Tax Justice and Human Rights
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full time (37.5 hours per week)
Salary: £30,000
Location: Home-based (anywhere in the world)
Continue reading “Job vacancy: Researcher for the Tax Justice Network (2)”
How are Switzerland, the United States, and the Caymans working against African efforts to stem the tide of illicit financial flows? They’re among the worst offenders in the Tax Justice Network’s 2018 Financial Secrecy Index.
The index was launched at the end of January 2018 and weights a country’s secrecy score against its global share of financial services. This means that countries that top the rankings have a far higher risk for illicit financial flows running through their systems than countries that may have a higher level of secrecy, but have much smaller-scale financial services. 20 key indicators are used to assess secrecy levels, including banking and tax court secrecy, country-by-country reporting compliance, ownership disclosure rules, and tax administration capacity. Continue reading “Africa’s battle against financial secrecy: Financial Secrecy Index”
The importance of reducing, and eventually eliminating, illicit financial flows, has now been recognised in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the United Nations, as key to ensuring good governance, as well as contributing to the domestic resource mobilisation necessary for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015.[1] However, there is now some debate about what is covered by this term. Continue reading “Illicit financial flows and the tax haven and offshore secrecy system”
The Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) has launched a ‘roadmap’ for taxing multinationals. This important intervention not only confirms the failure of current tax rules to deliver fair outcomes internationally, but sets the course for a specific alternative that would significantly strengthen fiscal sovereignty for countries at all income levels: unitary taxation with formulary apportionment.
“ The fairest and most effective version of unitary taxation is multi-factor global formulary apportionment with a minimum corporate tax rate. We urge global leaders to adopt a roadmap towards this goal, including more short-term measures which would be more effective, easier to administer, and provide greater certainty, than the current defective methods.”
This week the Tax Justice Network released the results of the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index bringing the real story on global corruption to the world’s attention. We’ve seen some of the usual protests from some in the offshore world but what they cannot get away from, much as they might like to, is that the index is based on objective, verifiable criteria. There are no perceptions here, no opinions. The Financial Secrecy index is a politically neutral ranking, the only one available to aid genuine understanding of global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows or capital flight. Continue reading “Financial Secrecy Index 2018: watch and listen”
We’re very pleased to be announcing the launch of our new monthly Arabicpodcast/radio show Taxes Simply الجباية ببساطة, sister to our Spanish language service, Justicia ImPositiva and our English language Taxcast, contributing to the tax justice public debate around the world.
Taxes simply الجباية ببساطة is produced and presented by Walid Ben Rhouma, available for listeners to download and free to radio networks to broadcast across the region. You can join the programme on Facebook and on Twitter. Continue reading “Our new Tax Justice Network Arabic monthly podcast/radio show الجباية ببساطة”
In our January 2018 Taxcast we explore the results of the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index just out, that tell the real story of global corruption. We look at:
Featuring: John Christensen, Rachel Etter-Phoya and Andres Knobel of the Tax Justice Network. Produced and presented by Naomi Fowler.
“What the Financial Secrecy Index has done I think is help the public understand that tax havenry is much, much more deeply embedded in the entire global economy and it isn’t just small players with palm trees, it includes some of the biggest and most powerful countries in the world” ~ John Christensen
Want to download and listen on the go? Download onto your phone or hand held device by clicking ‘save as’ here.
Want more Taxcasts? The full playlist is here (our new Taxcast library) and here. Or here.
Want to subscribe? Subscribe via email by contacting the Taxcast producer on naomi [at] taxjustice.net OR subscribe to the Taxcast RSS feed here OR subscribe to our youtube channel, Tax Justice TV OR find us on Spotify, iTunes or Stitcher.
Switzerland, the United States and the Cayman Islands are the world’s biggest contributors to financial secrecy, according to the latest edition of the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index.
The full financial secrecy index can be found online at www.financialsecrecyindex.com
Continue reading “Switzerland, USA and Cayman top the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index”
The UN Sustainable Development Goals agreed globally in 2015 includes a target, for the first time, to reduce illicit flows. Three years later, however, the process to identify appropriate and sufficiently robust indicators is still ongoing. Meanwhile, policy processes and advocacy efforts are themselves held back by a lack of consensus on the most robust estimates. At the same time, there is a lack of consensus on where efforts to improve data and methodologies should focus – with the result that progress is likely to be unduly slow.
The Tax Justice Network has therefore decided to initiate a process aimed at making a degree of progress in each of these areas. We plan to publish a book, drawing together the leading estimates of various components of illicit flows and offering a critical evaluation of the data and methodology used in each case, along with recommendations for the most promising areas for future work. Each chapter will address a different approach, including the work of many of those receiving this email. Each chapter will be published online, in the collaborative forum provided by Github/Gitbook, and our fervent hope is that many of you will invest the time to review this work and – crucially – to make your own contributions. Continue reading “Identifying and reducing illicit financial flows: collaborate with us!”
We’re hiring! Details below and download your job information pack here.
Key facts:
Application closing date: Thursday 15 February 2018
Start date: March/April 2018
Reports to: Director, Financial Secrecy
Contract: Fixed-term contract (18 months, ending October 2019)
Hours: 75% to 100% FTE (28 to 37.5 hours per week)
Salary: €32.500 to €37.500 (pro rata)
Location: Home-based (anywhere in the world) Continue reading “Job vacancy: Researcher for the Tax Justice Network”
Welcome to this month’s latest podcast and radio programme in Spanish with Marcelo Justo and Marta Nuñez, downloaded and broadcast on radio networks across Latin America and Spain. ¡Bienvenidos y bienvenidas a nuestro podcast y programa radiofónica! (abajo en castellano).
In edition 19 of our podcast/radio show, January 2018:
GUESTS:
Here at the Tax Justice Network news has reached us about an interesting case in Guatemala involving Desarrolladora Internacional DCI, a Walmart subsidiary.
According to prosecutors, employees working at the Walmart subsidiary, DCI and at another Walmart company, Operadora de Tiendas, set up a network of fake companies to issue invoices for agricultural products bought on the informal market. Low paid workers were recruited as directors and paid between 1000-1500 Quetzals a month (£100-150) to sign blank cheque books.
The companies are said to have operated the fraud for years, invoicing 21bn Quetzals over the period leading to a VAT fraud worth 1bn Quetzals. Continue reading “Walmart faces allegations of tax evasion in Guatemala”
Continue reading “Seventy-seven nation industrial reserve army”
The American Interest magazine has published an article by TJN senior adviser James Henry in which he points out that the damage caused by President Trump’s tax reforms will ripple out way beyond the USA, where many citizens will be seriously harmed (we reported on the human rights implications of the tax reform here), damaging the well-being of the rest of the world, particularly the poorest nations. As Henry comments:
It is one thing for America’s aging elite, their enablers, donors, and friends on Wall Street to infect themselves and their offspring with affluenza, an unhealthy obsession with the accumulation of unlimited private wealth and power. It is quite another to infect the entire rest of the world with it.”
Continue reading “The US’s ‘Trump/Goldman tax law’ and the race to the bottom”
We are pleased to recommend the newly released film HSBC: Gangsters of Finance, produced by ARTE TV in German, French, English and Spanish. They describe the film as follows:
Since the 2008 crisis, HSBC has been involved in countless scandals: Money laundering for drug cartels, corruption, tax fraud… And yet the international bank escapes justice with insignificant fines. Why are they “too big to jail?”
Remember our paper calling for the registration of trusts? Back then the British government opposed this. During discussions related to the EU 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, Treasury spokesperson Lord Newby even said: “We consider registration of trusts to be a disproportionate approach and, in particular, one which undermines the common-law basis of trusts in the UK.”
It may be unfair to ridicule statements made in another era (2014), if it weren’t for the fact that they are still being made in the more modern times of 2017, such as when Jersey Finance claimed, in response to our trust paper, that “the requirement that all persons connected to a trust should be registered is unworkable, disproportionate, costly, and burdensome”.
Now, lo and behold, in 2017 the UK has approved registration of the beneficial owners of trusts…that meet certain conditions. Information will not be publicly accessible – but what were you expecting?! Continue reading “Trusts and the UK: half a step forward, three steps backwards”
In our December 2017 Taxcast: We speak with two time Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist Jake Bernstein about his new book ‘Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite’. We ask what makes offshore players like Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca tick, and what do the Panama Papers and now the Paradise Papers tell us about Presidents Putin, Trump and the transnational oligarchy? Plus:
Continue reading “Secrecy, oligarchs and offshore psychology in our December 2017 podcast”
The US tax bill will be published on Friday 15th December 2017 and will be voted on by Congress early next week. Senior Policy Advisor Didier Jacobs at Oxfam America has written this blog:
The Exceptionalist Tax Bill
The United States Congress is about to adopt a major tax reform that reflects American exceptionalism – the idea that the United States is too awesome to play by international rules. Foreigners, fasten your seat belts!
The Finance Ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom have written to their US counterpart to warn him that some provisions of the tax bill may contravene trade agreements and tax treaties. The issue is also relevant to emerging countries like China, India or Brazil, which invest in the United States and compete with US companies on global markets. Continue reading “US tax reform and conflicts with international law: guest blog”
Miguel Urbán Crespo, Member of the European Parliament, PODEMOS has produced this guest blog, translated by Luke Stobard which we’re pleased to share:
In his famous work ‘The Ancien Régime and the Revolution’ Alexis Tocqueville held that the French revolution did not really begin in 1789 but two years earlier when the aristocracy refused to pay taxes in the “revolt of the privileged”. The event forced Louis XVI to convene the Estates-General and ally himself with the Third Estate (commoners) to end the aristocracy’s privileges. On 19 June 1790 all hereditary titles of nobility were abolished and associated tax exemptions deemed a “national offence”. Continue reading “Vive la revolutión… fiscal! Guest blog”
Welcome to this month’s latest podcast and radio programme in Spanish with Marcelo Justo and Marta Nuñez, downloaded and broadcast on radio networks across Latin America and Spain. ¡Bienvenidos y bienvenidas a nuestro podcast y programa radiofónica! (abajo en castellano).
In the December 2017 programme:
We are pleased to announce our final launch date for the next Financial Secrecy Index (FSI). The launch will take place on 30 January 2018 at 18.00 CET.
This next FSI will be covering 112 jurisdictions up from 92 in 2015. We have substantially increased the number of Key Financial Secrecy Indicators to 20 (from 15) and implemented many changes that have been suggested during our stakeholder survey in 2016. Many of the indicators are either exploring new uncharted waters (e.g. comparative freeport and public real estate registry research) or drilling deeper into existing indicators. This will be our most comprehensive FSI, and a more rigorous assessment of financial secrecy than any that has been completed so far by academic or regulatory institutions. Continue reading “Financial Secrecy Index 2018 – Launch Date January, 30th”
