The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition joined with Tax Justice Network on May 17th to discuss their flag research initiative, the Financial Secrecy Index. The Financial Secrecy Index ranks countries around the world based on “how intensely the country’s financial and legal system allows individuals to hide and launder money extracted from around the world.”
While the U.S. is joining with governments around the world to locate and freeze Russian oligarch assets, this task is made more difficult by existing systems of financial secrecy that allow people, including kleptocrats and criminals, to hide their financial assets from authorities and investigators. In its 2020 ranking, the U.S. was identified as the second most secretive jurisdiction in the world, demonstrating that “offshore” finance isn’t so offshore, after all. The failure of the U.S. to measurably reduce its financial secrecy–or worse, to have increased it–would be entirely self-defeating in light of U.S.-led international efforts to sanction Russian oligarchs. It would also undermine democracy and the rule of law globally, as well as enable tax avoidance and evasion, robbing global governments of resources they need to fight inequality and address the climate crisis.
