Financial Transparency Coalition

California spends about $8,500 per year to educate its public school students. That’s about $3,300 less than the national average. In fact, according to Education Week in a national ranking of states and D.C., California ranks near the bottom, at 49^th, in terms of per-pupil spending. There are reasons to believe that one cause of this problem is the system of property taxation in California—and its loopholes. The biggest player in property taxation and its policy in California is Proposition 13. Approved by California’s voters in 1978, Proposition 13 sets limits on the annual increases of assessed value...

In the United States, the overall noncompliance rate for all federal taxes and individual income taxes stands at about 14 percent. According to studies by the Taxpayer Compliance Research Program and the National Research Program, about 1 percent of wages and salaries are underreported and about 4 percent of taxable interest and dividends are misreported. A study of Germany found that the corporate tax base would have increased by 14% if no income-shifting had occurred. Developing countries lose about $900 billion in illicit outflows per year, which severely undermines these nations' abilities to effectively raise revenue. These activities are...

We often think of tax havens as tropical islands or tiny nations nestled in the mountains. We know most of them are geographically and demographically small. Very small. Given their huge reputations, just how small they are just might surprise you. Ireland, which is well known for its emerald hills and low tax rates, is about the same size as South Carolina. Luxembourg, a tax haven nestled in Western Europe between France and Germany, is about 2,500 square kilometers, or about a third of size of Rhode Island. Bermuda, a group of islands off the coast of South Carolina, is...

If you have had much contact with the disciple of economics in the last year, you’ve heard of the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by French economist Thomas Piketty. And Capital concerns two subjects that are very near and dear to us at the Financial Transparency Coalition: inequality and taxes. Piketty’s book is all the rage among economists and policy wonks. Perhaps for good reason. In a unique exploration of a new dataset, Piketty parses through literally centuries of tax data to discern long-term trends in inequality and wealth. His conclusions are broad and many, but...