Tax Evasion - Eyes Wide Shut

  

The United States is the world's leading perpetrator of financial secrecy, citing the country's refusal to share key information with the tax authorities of other nations and its status as a generous tax haven for foreign oligarchs, rich executives, and other elites.

The Tax Justice Network (TJN) found that "the U.S. now fuels more global financial secrecy than Switzerland, Cayman, and Bermuda combined."

Despite U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign pledge to "bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies, "Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen conceded, "There's a good argument that, right now, the best place to hide and launder ill-gotten gains is actually the United States."

TJN stressed that the shell company law enacted in January 2021 is riddled with loopholes such as "limited definitions of which legal entities and beneficial owners must register, 23 baked-in exemptions to registration, and an absence of requirements on all trusts."

TJN researcher Moran Harari explained that "once again, a small club of rich countries setting global rules on finance and tax are found to be the ones most responsible for facilitating financial secrecy and tax abuses."

"For decades, rich G7 countries courted billionaires, oligarchs, and corporate giants with secrecy loopholes and eyes-wide-shut-regulations," said Harari. "The regulations they imposed facilitated the robbing of billions from poorer countries' public purses. And now those same regulations are making it nearly impossible for G7 countries themselves to track down the billions held offshore by sanctioned Russian oligarchs."

'A Shameful Distinction': US Ranked World's Biggest Perpetrator of Financial Secrecy (commondreams.org)