In TJN’s inaugural Taxcast, rounding up tax justice news at the end of January, they discuss the implications of the Vodafone vs India landmark tax case, compare Bill Gates and Mitt Romney’s attitudes to taxation and visit the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
MEXICO CITY / WASHINGTON, DC – Crime, corruption and tax evasion cost the Mexican economy US$872 billion between 1970 and 2010 according to a new report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington, DC-based research and advocacy organization. The illicit financial outflows, which averaged a massive 5.2% of GDP, grew significantly over the 41-year period studied from just US$1 billion in 1970 to US$68.5 billion in 2010.
Nick Mathiason’s article in The Guardian’s The Comment is Free went up today – Five Steps to Combat Global Tax Evasion
An Op-Ed by the Task Force was published today by Politico on Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and tax avoidance in Bermuda.
WASHINGTON, DC – Developing countries lost US$903 billion in illicit financial outflows in 2009 despite the massive slowdown in economic activity which rocked world markets in late 2008, finds a new study by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington-based research and advocacy organization.
It is appropriate that the United Nations officially recognizes Anti-Corruption (9 December) and Human Rights (10 December) on two consecutive days as the two issues are inextricably linked. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…” Corruption undermines a society’s ability to attain these basic standards. When corrupt individuals and institutions steal aid money, or a Multinational Corporation exploits a country’s resources or shifts profits to evade taxes, it is the average citizen that suffers lack of food, education, medical care, and more.
LONDON – The issue of tax collection is rising fast up the political and social agenda, as countries across the world make deep cuts in public spending and increase taxes in ways that hurt the poor and the middle classes the most.
This new research demonstrates how important it is to tackle tax evasion and the tax havens that help wealthy individuals and organisations escape from contributing to the services that directly benefit them – from the health and education systems that support their workforces, to the roads that ship their goods to markets, to the courts of law that enforce their contracts or to the police who protect their property.
The international community has repeatedly stressed the need to mobilise domestic resources in developing countries, as the most sustainable way of financing development and ending aid dependency. Yet, many developing countries are affected by a number of challenges that limit their capacity to collect taxes. One such challenge is multinational companies’ lack of accountability regarding their operations and more specifically regarding the taxes they pay. This report explains how the cross border nature of multinational companies’ operations combined with the absence of adequate transparency regulations have very damaging implications for a country’s ability to mobilise domestic resources. Although this is relevant for both developed and developing countries, the report focuses on the impacts for developing countries, which have weaker capacities to face this challenge.
The Task Force 2011 Conference section of this website has now been updated in both English and French. It will remain on this site as a product of the successful conference and valuable resource both for attendees and those who could not make it to Paris.
PARIS – Day 1 of the Task Force Conference is now behind us, and we’re about to begin our second day. While we get set to hear panels on Anti-Money Laundering, Trade Mispricing, Trafficking in Illicit Goods, Corrupt Dictators & the Arab Spring, IUU Fishing, and more today, check out a selection of photos from yesterday’s festivities in our Flickr slideshow below.
Also, remember that you can watch the conference live on our website in French (HERE) and English (HERE).
International oil companies such as the U.S. giant Chevron are beginning exploration off of Liberia’s coastline. However, this new research by Global Witness and Liberian Oil and Gas Initiative (LOGI)1 suggests that while Liberia has come a long way from the devastating set of resource-financed civil wars that claimed the lives of 250,000 people between 1989 and 2003, serious governance problems persist, and the warning signs for the emerging oil sector are stark.
Curse or Cure? How oil can boost or break Liberia’s post-war recovery shows that even before a discovery is made, there are deep-seated problems in Liberia’s oil sector: government officials and at least one company have paid bribes, contracts have been awarded illegally and companies with little experience in the oil sector have received concessions.
With a crucial election upcoming in October 2011, the new Liberian government and international donors have a choice. They can reform the country’s laws and government agencies so that Liberia’s people benefit from oil. Or they can allow Liberia to continue down its present path, undermining the country’s post-war reconstruction and risking a return to the corrupt, unstable resource management that has characterized Liberia’s history. This report sets out the problems and makes recommendations for what needs to be done.
There is a lot about the world that defies explanation. But if we do know one thing it’s that the world is a complicated place. That answers aren’t always obvious. That you have to look at short-run and long-run dynamics, with the full inter-play of all the forces, to truly begin to understand why things in our world happen as they do.
The tragic famine that struck Somalia this summer is no exception to this rule, which occurred as East Africa faced one its worst droughts in 60 years, precipitated by dangerously low rainfall, depleting food supplies, and rising prices of basic necessities like grains and milk. But droughts and food shortages do not by extension lead to famines, which the United Nations conservatively will only declare when “acute malnutrition rates among children exceed 30 percent, more than 2 people per 10,000 die per day and people are not able to access food and other basic necessities.” While food shortages are, perhaps, necessary for famine, they are not sufficient. In today’s world starvation is the product of not only biological and economic forces, but political ones, too.
The draught was not confined to Somalia. In fact, food shortages are plaguing the entire Horn of Africa, which includes Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Eritrea. American officials estimate that across the region, more than 10 million people need emergency rations to survive. But the UN has declared the catastrophe an official famine in only two areas southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle, both are in southern Somalia, both are controlled by the lethal militant group, al-Shabab. There are reasons for this.
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