International tax rules and international trade rules are unfair to lower-income countries: that is not only well known, but unsurprising. Rules are generally set by the most powerful parties at the table. What is more, the tax rules and the trade rules interact, with trade rules frequently … [Read more...]
Open Data for Tax Justice
Blacklisting the EU: Paradise lost?
On December 5 the EU will be publishing a list of jurisdictions that it considers to be non-cooperative in international tax matters. Today, we name the jurisdictions that we evaluate as meeting their published criteria, in a report co-authored with Wouter Lips of Ghent University and published at … [Read more...]
Open data for tax justice – designing a new CbCR database
This week, TJN participated in a design sprint in London organised by Open Knowledge International. The purpose of the sprint was to bring together coders and tax justice advocates to start work on building a database for the new country by country reporting data that we hope will be released in … [Read more...]
Technology and online beneficial ownership registries: 21st century transparency
At the Global Tax Transparency Summit meeting held in London in December 2016, a senior official from the tax haven of Jersey claimed that one of the reasons for not making their registry of company ownership available to public scrutiny was the lack of a global standard for public company … [Read more...]
Estimating tax avoidance: New findings, new questions
By Alex Cobham There are now a range of estimates of the global scale of tax avoidance. These include: the $600 billion annual tax loss estimated by IMF researchers Crivelli et al. (2015; 2016), which divides roughly into $400 billion of OECD losses and $200 billion elsewhere; the $100 … [Read more...]
How could a global public database help to tackle corporate tax avoidance?
A new research report published today looks at the current state and future prospects of a global public database of corporate accounts. We are cross posting this OpenDemocracy article written by Jonathan Gray, with permission from our partners on the open data for tax justice project at Open … [Read more...]
Open Data For Tax Justice: the creation of a public database of country-by-country reporting data
How much tax do multinational companies pay in your country? Leading tax justice campaigners (including the Tax Justice Network) and open data specialists are working on helping you find out with their open data for tax justice project. Today they're publishing a white paper entitled What Do They … [Read more...]
Crowdsourcing request: “We are not a tax haven!”
Over the years, we've chronicled the tax haven denial of many secrecy jurisdictions, even building a partial list of those who have publicly claimed "We are not a tax haven!" Now, at the prompting of tax twitter (notably Mary Cosgrove and Stephanie Johnston, with honourable mentions to Aisling … [Read more...]
Creating an open CBCR database – your views please!
TJN has, since its establishment in 2003, led the way in developing and promoting the idea of public country-by-country reporting (CBCR) for multinational companies. Open Knowledge International, who partnered with TJN in establishing Open Data for Tax Justice (#OD4TJ), are pioneers in using open … [Read more...]
Open Data for Tax Justice: Launch! #OD4TJ
Every year countries lose billions of dollars to tax avoidance, tax evasion and more generally to illicit financial flows. According to a recent IMF estimate around $700 billion of tax revenues is lost each year due to profit-shifting. In developing countries the loss is estimated to be around $200 … [Read more...]
