Thousands of ASAP supporters, researchers, teachers, and activists around the world took part in ASAP’s first petition campaign, calling on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to give greater prominence to international tax abuse in the Sustainable Development Goals framework.

As the UN General Assembly opened its 69th General Debate, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon affirmed that before the end of the year he would deliver a synthesis report, laying the groundwork for intergovernmental negotiations over the contents of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda.

Among the prominent scholars urging action on tax abuse were Robert Keohane, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Martin Rees, Jean-Pierre Lehmann, Peter Singer, Henry Shue, Sonia Bhalotra, Branko Milanovic, Simon Caney, Debapriya Bhattacharya, Juliana Martínez Franzoni, and David Hulme. Many researchers and campaigners doing leading work on tax and illicit financial flows joined the campaign as well, including John Christensen, Helen Dennis, Richard Murphy, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Krishen Mehta, Raymond Baker, and Robin Hodess.

Tax abuse, one of the main sources of illicit financial flows, “constitutes a massive headwind against development,” the more than sixty experts in poverty, development, tax, ethics, and international affairs and 2,170 other signatories write in their petition letter to Ban. “The think tank Global Financial Integrity estimates that, through trade misinvoicing alone, $4.7 trillion were siphoned out of developing countries during the 2002-2011 period, $760 billion in 2011 alone. This is five or six times the sum total of all official development assistance flowing into these countries during the same periods.”

Despite the enormity of the problem, the SDG draft text merely speaks vaguely of curbing illicit financial outflows from the developing countries (16.4) and of helping them improve their tax collection (target 17.1) ― without making any specific demands on richer nations to stop facilitating this drain on development.

ASAP has just released a Delphi study synthesizing the collective wisdom of 27 illicit financial flows experts with diverse professional profiles from five developing and five developed countries. Over several rounds of responding to one another’s ideas and arguments, the group identified as highly desirable some key reforms, long advocated by civil society campaigners, which would increase financial transparency at both the domestic and global levels. These proposed reforms include that all governments should mandate

1. that each company, trust or foundation disclose the natural person(s) who own or control it,
2. that each MNC report profits and other tax-relevant information separately for each country so as to make apparent when tax havens account for a much larger share of its profits than of its operations,
3. that national tax authorities automatically exchange tax-relevant financial information worldwide to make it easier to detect and prosecute tax evasion by corporations and individuals,
4. that corporations publicly report on funds they pay to governments for the extraction of natural resources,
5. that tough sanctions, including jail time, be imposed on senior officers of global banks, accounting firms, law firms, insurance companies and hedge funds for facilitating tax evasion.
6. In addition, the experts agreed that governments themselves should commit to harmonizing anti-money laundering regulations internationally and
7. carrying out clear, reliable, frequent and timely public fiscal reporting and opening up their fiscal policy-making process to public participation.

Including these objectives as targets or indicators in the final SDG document would boost the prospects of reforms that are essential to curtailing tax abuse as well as embezzlement, money laundering, and other criminal activities.

Massive poverty-related human rights deficits persist. By releasing vastly more revenues than the foreign aid the SDG draft envisions, the proposed reforms would greatly enhance the capacity of developing countries to safeguard their citizens’ human rights. For many people in these countries this step toward basic global justice would mean far more than any amount of charity.

Never before has there been so much popular support and political will to end the scourge of tax abuse. In the face of massive lobbying efforts to prevent or dilute any reforms, the UN should seize this special opportunity to help build a more transparent financial system and thereby to diminish a crucial obstacle to development and poverty eradication.

Read ASAP’s petition letter to Ban Ki-moon here.

The group of poverty, development, tax, ethics, and international affairs experts who signed the letter includes:

• Robert Keohane, Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University
• Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Emerita, at Princeton University
• Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge
• Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Branko Milanovic, Presidential Fellow at the City University of New York and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Henry Shue, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Susan Rose-Ackerman, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School
• David Hulme, Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Sonia Bhalotra, Professor of Economics at the University of Essex and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• John Roemer, Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Ernst von Weizsäcker, Co-President of the Club of Rome
• Nicole Rippin, Senior Economist at the German Development Institute
• Jean-Pierre Lehmann, Professor Emeritus of International Political Economy at IMD Business School
• Attiya Waris, Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Nairobi
• Richard Murphy, Director of Tax Research UK
• Sol Picciotto, Emeritus Professor of Law at Lancaster University Law School
• Reuven Avi-Yonah, the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School
• Debapriya Bhattacharya, Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Policy Dialogue
• Eleni Tsingou, Assistant Professor of Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School
• Ronen Palan, Professor of International Political Economy at City University London
• Lorraine Eden, Professor of Management at Texas A & M University
• Martin Hearson, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science
• Wilson Prichard, Joint Research Director for the International Centre for Tax and Development at the Institute for Development Studies
• Raymond Baker, President of Global Financial Integrity and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Tom Cardamone, Managing Director of Global Financial Integrity
• Dev Kar, Chief Economist at Global Financial Integrity
• Heather Lowe, Legal Counsel and Director of Government Affairs at Global Financial Integrity
• Krishen Mehta, Founding Director of Asia Initiatives
• Vito Tanzi, Former Director of the Fiscal Affairs Division of the International Monetary Fund
• John Christensen, Director of Tax Justice Network International
• Nicholas Shaxson, Author of Treasure Islands
• Jack Blum, Chair of Tax Justice Network USA
• Daniel Reeves, Board Member of Tax Justice Network USA
• Robin Hodess, USA Group Director — Research and Knowledge at Transparency International
• Helen Dennis, Senior Advisor – Poverty and Inequality, Christian Aid
• Joseph Stead, Senior Advisor – Economic Justice, Christian Aid
• Anthea Lawson, Lead Investigator on Financial Institutions and Corruption at Global Witness
• David McNair, Director of Transparency for the ONE Campaign
• Ignacio Saiz, Executive Director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights
• Niko Lusiani, Director of the Human Rights in Economic Policy program at the Center for Economic and Social Rights
• Alnoor Ladha, Executive Director of /The Rules and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Peter Wahl, Researcher at WEED — Weltwirtschaft, Ökologie & Entwicklung
• Stefano Prato, Managing Director at the Society for International Development
• Caitlin Blaser, Director of Communications at Global Call to Action Against Poverty
• Andrea Ordóñez, Research Coordinator for Southern Voice
• Shaazka Beyerle, Author of Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice
• Paul Slovic, Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Alberto Cimadamore, Scientific Director of CROP Secretariat and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Des Gasper, Professor of States, Societies, and World Development at the International Institute of Social Studies and member of the ASAP Advisory Board
• Paul Kingston, Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science and International Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough
• Richard Sandbrook, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto
• Alison Jaggar, College Professor of Distinction in the Department of Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder
• Darrel Moellendorf, Principle Investigator at the Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence at Goethe University Frankfurt
• Simon Caney, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford
• Solomon Benatar, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto
• María José Guerra Palermo, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Universidad de la Laguna
• Sridhar Venkatapuram, Lecturer in Social Science Health and Medicine at King’s College London
• Beatriz Carrillo Garcia, Lecturer in China Studies at the University of Sydney
• Paulette Dieterlen, Professor of Philosophy at UNAM
• Txetxu Ausín, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Philosophy at the Spanish National Research Council
• Pahlaj Moolio, Professor and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Mathematics, Sciences, and Engineering at Paññasastra University
• Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Research at the University of Costa Rica
• Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and President of ASAP
• Mitu Sengupta, Associate Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Jason Hickel, Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Luis Cabrera, Associate Professor of Government and International Relations at Griffith University and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Keith Horton, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Helen Yanacopulos, Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Development at the Open University and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Ashok Acharya, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Delhi and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Ellen Szarleta, Assistant Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Northwest and ASAP Director of Communications
• Catarina Tully, Director of FromOverHere and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Matthew Lindauer, Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Yale University and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Miles Thompson, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Politics, and Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University and member of the ASAP Board of Directors
• Paula Casal, ICREA Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and member of the ASAP Board of Directors

A list of the 2,170 individuals who signed the petition through Avaaz.org is available here.