Offshore Tax-Haven Data Made Public As Companies Brace For Scrutiny
Source: Huffington Post
WASHINGTON -- The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Friday made public what it calls the most extensive collection of records on offshore accounts in history, encouraging sleuths to ferret out possible tax evasion.
The online portal, called the Offshore Leaks Database, contains hundreds of thousands of records showing corporations set up in so-called "tax-haven" countries, gleaned from the contents of about 2.5 million emails and financial documents that ICIJ said it received in early 2012. Over the past year, the data have been used by journalists around the world to detail alleged tax evasion by billionaires, oligarchs, emirs, princes and multinational corporations on nearly every continent.
Publication of the documents may heighten scrutiny of some of the world's largest financial institutions and their clients. Governments worldwide have renewed efforts to stamp out tax avoidance as fiscal authorities, including those from Europe and the United States, confront record budget deficits and slow-growth economies.
A 2012 report by the Tax Justice Network (TJN) found that untaxed wealth invested in offshore tax havens ran between $28 and $32 trillion dollars, equal to two years’ worth of U.S. economic output. The report estimated that if the money were to have been invested in home countries, even at low rates of return, it could have generated hundreds of billions of dollars per year in tax revenue.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/offshore-tax-haven-_n_3443722.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
over at Bain starting to squirm just a wee bit? 
