On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President’s proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex “shadow” financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.
WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity welcomes Krishen Mehta, as the newest member of its Advisory Board. Mr. Mehta is a U.S. CPA and has been a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for almost 20 years. From 1994 to 2008 Mr. Mehta worked closely with PwC clients in Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, and India.
India’s opposition party leader L.K. Advani sparked a political conflagration with pre-election campaign remarks that India was losing tens of billions of dollars each year in illicit financial outflows, or “black money”. He asserted that the National Democratic Alliance would vigorously pursue recovery of these lost assets if voted into power. With the rolling election now in progress, the issue of India’s missing billions has grown progressively thornier, as both sides vie to take the moral high ground.
Whatever the outcome of the election, India’s problem has broader implications both for the developing world and for efforts by the Group of 20 developed and developing nations to craft an effective post-crisis economic plan for the global financial system.
I want to talk about two things this morning. One, the international structure that supports the flow of illicit money across borders, and two the harmful impact these illicit flows have on economic growth and poverty alleviation in poorer countries.
To begin, let’s get a simple picture of global poverty and inequality fixed in our minds.
