June 20, 2019
By Ben Iorio With the rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, the norms for currency have changed. Cryptocurrencies allow transactions to take place with a currency not regulated by any country. In essence, cryptocurrencies are currencies existing completely...
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services has scheduled a Thursday markup on an anti-money laundering (AML) bill (HR 6068) stripped of beneficial ownership provisions necessary to address this widely-recognized and well-documented vulnerability in the U.S. AML regime.
By Heather Lowe, February 8, 2018
Yesterday’s announcement of a guilty plea by Rabobank NA with corresponding penalty and forfeiture of $369 million did not immediately strike people as new or surprising. In fact, the pattern of anti-money laundering/Bank Secrecy Act (AML/BSA) violations...
On December 11, 2017, Global Financial Integrity sent a letter to Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Ranking Member Maxine Waters of the House Financial Services Committee urging the Committee to vote “NO” on H.R. 4519, which would repeal a crucial bi-partisan anti-corruption law known from Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Section 1504 helps the U.S. government combat corruption in the oil, gas and mining sectors globally.
“Today, neither legislators nor investors have any reliable information about multinationals’ profit shifting practices apart from the result of them—less revenue in the U.S. treasury and greater risk of enforcement actions worth billions of dollars,” commented Heather Lowe, Legal Counsel and Director of Government Affairs at Global Financial Integrity.
Today the U.S. Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) published a rule, which will become final tomorrow, requiring the U.S. parent company of large, public and privately held multinational companies to provide certain financial data to the IRS on a country-by-country basis. The information is meant to provide tax authorities with better tools to identify where a company might be artificially shifting profits into tax havens—a red flag for tax evasion and tax avoidance that may warrant further investigation.
The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Justice announced a raft of measures and proposals to address critical vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system on May 5th, following actions taken by other countries in response to the Panama Papers disclosures. GFI welcomes the introduction of these measures after a four year process but urges Treasury and Justice to fix serious gaps in the requirements for identifying the beneficial owners of companies.
Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and over 100 other members of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition have submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) urging them to maintain and strengthen a proposed rule on Country-by-Country Reporting that would bring much needed transparency to how U.S.-based companies book profits and pay taxes in many of the countries in which they have subsidiaries. The proposed rule is meant to give the IRS and, potentially, foreign tax authorities, a window into how multinational companies may be gaming the international tax system and avoiding taxation in the U.S. and other countries. Today is the final day to submit public comments to Treasury and the IRS on the proposed rulemaking.