Financial Transparency Coalition

It all started last month when Walgreens, the iconic American pharmacy chain, announced that it would move its headquarters to Switzerland as part of a merger with the European chain Alliance Boots. The move, known as an “inversion”, essentially involves a company merging with another company that is based in a jurisdiction with lower taxes. Once they merge, the newly formed group will usually move its headquarters to the lower tax jurisdiction to avoid paying taxes in their home country. However, this move is usually a pure technicality, meaning that while the...

Sarah Petre-Mears controls more than 1,200 companies across the Caribbean, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Supposedly. Actually Petre-Mears doesn’t know much about the companies for which she passes resolutions and helps set up bank accounts; all she needs to do is sign her name. Because Petre-Mears is actually just a nominee-director, who keep the real owners of her companies secret by selling their names for use on official company documents, whilst giving addresses in obscure places all over the world. Walk into Madrid’s famed art museum, Thyssen-Bornemiza, and you’ll find the private art collection of Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, which...

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity today applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for working with over fifty jurisdictions to establish agreements enabling the bilateral automatic exchange of tax information as part of the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once famously wrote that "taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society"—a notion implicitly acknowledged by each of us when we file our tax returns with the IRS every April. Yet civilized society, at home and abroad, is precariously at risk today unless we do something to stem the rampant tax dodging facilitated by tax havens.