Thursday, April 19, 2007

Overview Resources

* Tax Justice Network's free publication tax us if you can provides a clear overview to tax justice issues. This book offers a guide to the language of international tax policy and shows how professionals profit from abusive tax practices. It also outlines the numerous policy failures that have encouraged the creation of the shadow economy of tax havens and proposes a range of practical solutions to this global crisis.

* Closing the Floodgates provides a follow-on that explains in more detail how capital flight and tax evasion impact development; the mechanisms used to shift capital out of developing countries to tax havens; and the role of the financial professionals and tax havens who profit from such activities. It identifies a range of solutions which countries can adopt to protect themselves from these predatory tax practices.

* TJN's March 2005 report The Price of Offshore estimates that the amount of funds held by individuals in offshore tax havens, to be about US$11.5 trillion. Using this estimate TJN calculated the worldwide tax revenue lost on the income from these assets at 255 billion dollars. Every year. This amount would more than plug the financing gap to achieve the United Nation's Millenium Development Goal of halving world poverty by 2015.

* In 2005, Christian Aid published a report called The Shirts Off Their Backs in which the authors warned that unless the massive gaps in poorer countries' revenues are plugged by responsible tax policies and international action to curb tax havens, the UN's poverty reduction targets will be missed. The Shirts Off Their Backs shows how poorer countries are losing $500 billion a year in revenues to prosperous international tax dodgers.

* Oxfam's 2000 briefing Tax Havens: Releasing the Hidden Billions for Poverty Eradication, which drew attention to the harmful impacts of tax havens on developing countries and identified why their negative impacts are felt more forcefully in the South.

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