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Tweeting my post: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/proposed-sdg-indicator-illicit-financial-flows-risks-conflating-ordinary-business-dirty-money … Illicit financial flows are dirty money crossing borders. Why is @UNCTAD suggesting we measure this by looking at legally compliant corporate tax practices?
The proposal for assessing progress on this is based on “misalignment”looking at aggregated data from CBCR reports and seeing where MNC profits don't match up with employee headcount and sales.
But this captures ordinary tax compliance as well as tax avoidance (since tax rules do not seek alignment between profits and the average of headcount and sales, and international businesses are not homogenous globally)
Before setting the indicator we should try it out with real data to see how much of a problem this is. I tested the metric out on three companies: Person, Vodafone, Barclays and Lush.
<spoiler alert> The calculation suggests ordinary business hides huge "illicit financial flows". The worst offender based on the metric was Fair Tax Marked Lush! (I don't think Lush is doing anything untoward but this is what the calculation spits out)pic.twitter.com/cFHa6RWvqf
Overall the big numbers (billions from just two companies!) are driven by large companies. I really don't think this indicator measures illicitness at all.pic.twitter.com/oqEuZv70sE
This indicator is being developed through expert consultations that are getting narrower, not wider. The last meeting managed to include multiple different representatives from Tax Justice Network orgs, but not a single tax practitioner http://unctad.org/en/Pages/MeetingDetails.aspx?meetingid=1864 …
As always you've made a very strong case... Just one question - is the original definition (focused on acts clearly illegal - which varies somewhat from place to place) measurable? Could the SDG target of reducing IFFs therefore actually be tracked if we went back to this?
Not in any easy way. There are efforts to bridge between bottom up crime-by-crime estimates & natnl accounts on one hand https://erskinomics.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/erskine-illicit-financial-flows-part-ii-count-the-devils.pdf … & AML National Risk Assessments on the other, which look at risks, threats & vulnerabilities http://www.fatf-gafi.org/publications/methodsandtrends/documents/ml-tf-risks.html … - both early stage
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