Illicit Finance

It’s a worry for many people that legitimate cross-border transactions - including vital remittances sent home by migrant workers - are becoming prohibitively expensive and burdensome because of over-zealous enforcement of anti-money laundering rules.  Would cryptocurrencies such as bitco...

In a few weeks’ time Australia’s Westpac bank will start closing down the accounts of money transfer organizations used by immigrants to send money home. Westpac is the last major Australian bank still offering services to organizations in the country’s US$25bn remittance sector. ...

De-banking is an ugly word, but it’s the focus of a new working group launched by CGD in Europe. Banks in rich countries, under pressure from anti–money laundering and counterterrorism enforcement efforts, are increasingly “de-banking” money transfer organizations that operate in p...

Aside from lurid revelations about individual companies and the big four accounting firms, the leaks of multinationals’ tax deals with Luxembourg confirm­—and expose to a wider audience­—the true nature of the tax ‘competition’ that prevents the emergence of eff...

Originally posted on Richard Murphy's Tax Research UK.org blog on November 21st.  A new paper from Gabriel Zucman (of London School of Economics, and erstwhile co-author of Thomas Piketty) in the (free-to-view) Journal of Economic Perspectives represents a milestone in ...

There is broad consensus on the need for the post-2015 successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals to respond to the challenge of illicit financial flows (IFF).