FINANCE
Ending US Financial Secrecy and Beneficial Ownership Registers
The rollercoaster story of the battle in the US (the world’s biggest global financial secrecy offender) over the implementation of a beneficial ownership register, the attempts to stop it and the (many) lessons learned from the UK’s registers. The US’s Corporate Transparency Act seemed to be on track. Until it wasn’t…
“Everything is bigger in Texas, that’s what they like to say! And as we’ve learned, even court orders are bigger in Texas.”
Meanwhile, we take a look at UK company registration progress, since the days when “You could just set up a company for 12 pounds and say you were Mickey Mouse with a shareholder Donald Duck and no one asked any questions.” (Spoiler alert: there’s still a long way to go)
- Zorka Milin
Policy Director, Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition
- Oliver Bullough
- Graham Barrow
Financial crime sleuth and podcaster, the Dark Money Files
- Cynthia O’Murchu
Financial Times Investigative Reporter, Investigations Team
- Ian Gary
Executive Director, FACT Coalition
Jargon
The person who actually benefits from the income or capital associated with owning something, and/or on whose behalf a transaction is being conducted. They are often different from legal or nominee owners, who may just be proxies who get no benefit from the asset, whose identity is used to hide the real beneficial owner.
Intermediaries like accountants, lawyers, wealth managers and bankers are not just passive facilitators of global tax abuse. They’re often active, and sometimes aggressive purveyors of these facilities.
HNWIs, pronounced Hen-Wees: Wealthy individuals. Commonly this means people with investable assets worth over US$1 million. In 2011 Capgemini and Merrill Lynch estimated that there were 10.9 million HNWIs worldwide, with financial wealth worth US$42 trillion.
Financial flows across borders that are either illicitly earned, transferred or used. Frequently described as “dirty money”. Breaking laws anywhere along the way earns such funds the label.
A tax haven or secrecy jurisdiction is a place that deliberately provides an escape route for people or entities who live or operate elsewhere. They shield them from whatever taxes, criminal laws, financial regulations, transparency or other constraints they don’t like. Ordinary people whose lives are affected by tax haven laws are not consulted on these laws because they live in other countries: they have no say in how those laws are made, thus undermining their democratic rights.
Tax evasion is an illegal – usually criminal – activity, by which a taxpayer escapes tax through deception. Tax avoidance, on the other hand, means getting around (or avoiding) the spirit of the law without actually breaking the law. There is a large grey area between the two poles of avoidance and evasion.
Richard Allen comes across a massive tax fraud that makes the Channel Islands loophole look like a tea party. He teams up with two more retailers whose businesses are being destroyed by it and they start to apply pressure to the tax authorities, HMRC, who seem reluctant to take on big online market players Amazon and eBay.
Music (in order of use) is courtesy of Cherry Red Records: Steal No Egg by Electric Orange and Movement by Praise Space Electric.
This is a Tax Justice Network podcast with Naomi Fowler of the Taxcast podcast. Produced by Naomi Fowler and Leo Schick and sound designed by Leo Schick.
Tax evasion is an illegal – usually criminal – activity, by which a taxpayer escapes tax through deception. Tax avoidance, on the other hand, means getting around (or avoiding) the spirit of the law without actually breaking the law. There is a large grey area between the two poles of avoidance and evasion.
Tax evasion is an illegal – usually criminal – activity, by which a taxpayer escapes tax through deception. Tax avoidance, on the other hand, means getting around (or avoiding) the spirit of the law without actually breaking the law. There is a large grey area between the two poles of avoidance and evasion.
A tax haven or secrecy jurisdiction is a place that deliberately provides an escape route for people or entities who live or operate elsewhere. They shield them from whatever taxes, criminal laws, financial regulations, transparency or other constraints they don’t like. Ordinary people whose lives are affected by tax haven laws are not consulted on these laws because they live in other countries: they have no say in how those laws are made, thus undermining their democratic rights.
“Tax is one of the smartest investments you can make.” That’s Professor Chris Harrop’s promise to companies, and his new tax funded impact model proves it by helping quantify how paying tax is not only good for their businesses, but for the economies they’re operating in, and of course for people and society.
Plus: Why have OECD countries just bent the knee to Donald Trump and given up their sovereign rights to tax US businesses operating within their own borders? Naomi Fowler speaks with Zorka Millin of the FACT Coalition about how US companies now have an exemption from the global minimum corporate tax. Also, Zorka discusses some progress on the Corporate Transparency Act’s rollercoaster journey in the US towards setting up a beneficial ownership register – a court ruling has pushed things a little further forward, which is good news since the United States is the world’s biggest financial secrecy offender. Now some of the watering down of the act needs to be reversed…
And finally, the UK has strengthened its whistleblower reward scheme, lawyer Mary Inman of Whistleblower Partners tells us more.
Produced by Tax Justice Network
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