Yes, We Can Tackle International Tax Evasion, If We Really Try
From the revelations contained in the Panama Papers to Paul Manafort’s conviction for hiding money in foreign bank accounts, we’ve become all too familiar with the vast scale of international tax evasion and the challenges of countering it effectively. In 2015, the Boston Consulting Group estimated that some eleven trillion dollars of wealth was parked in offshore locales, much of it out of reach of the tax authorities. But, at the start of this week, the EU Tax Observatory, an independent research laboratory based at the Paris School of Economics, released a new report on global tax evasion, which contained some positive news. “We estimate that offshore tax evasion has declined by a factor of about three over the last 10 years,” the report says. “This success shows that rapid progress ca...