Earlier this month, over 200 NGOs including ASAP presented a submission to a working group of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The submission calls for human rights protections to be incorporated into the international climate agreement to be negotiated in Paris later this year. Furthermore, it argues that a safe climate is essential for the realization of many human rights, including rights to life, health, food, water, housing, and self-determination. Climate change and some policies meant to bring it under control threaten to infringe on these rights. The submission expresses concern that although parties to the UNFCCC agreed in 2010 that human rights should be protected, this commitment has not been put into practice. They argue that now is the time to fully integrate human rights protections into the climate regime with talks on the Paris agreement already underway.

The full submission presented to the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) is available here.

Two cross-cutting debates about development are preoccupying officials, academics and civil society groups in the middle of this decade. One concerns the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), due to expire at the end of 2015. Some describe them as the most successful poverty eradication effort ever, others as a fraud or abysmal failure. The other debate is about the formulation of the MDGs’ successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 and meant to guide development efforts until 2030. What goals, targets and indicators should be included in the final document? Who should be involved in the drafting process and how?

ASAP President Thomas Pogge was featured in the WFUNA journal ACRONYM in a special issue titled Peaceful Societies: An Essential Element of Sustainable Development. Pogge\’s article focused on small-scale violence, including domestic violence and abuse in the workplace, which is a consistent presence in the lives of many poor people.

\”Small-scale violence and the continual threat thereof—just like the large-scale violence of wars, civil wars and local insurrections—is a terrible burden upon the poor and a grave impediment to efforts to improve their lives,\” Pogge writes.

His article draws on his recent investigation of how poor people conceive of poverty, a years-long study during which he, Scott Wisor, Sharon Bessell, and other collaborators developed the Individual Deprivation Measure.

In ACRONYM, Pogge argues that the violence and corruption that endanger the wellbeing of poor people are largely driven by forces outside the control of developing country governments, such as the arms trade, the control and sale of natural resources by repressive governments, and illicit financial flows.

\”A hugely important impediment to development, violence deserves a prominent place in the SDGs. But we must attack its root causes in systemic features of our global order, which only the more powerful countries can reform.\”

You can read Peaceful Societies online now. Pogge\’s article begins on page 32.

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.

Special Issue of Symposion: The Sustainable Development Goals

Guest Editors:
Stefan Cibian (Visiting Professor, Department of Political Science, Babes-Bolyai University),
Ana-Maria Lebada (Adviser on Post-2015 Agenda, Permanent Mission of Romania to the United Nations), Thomas Pogge (Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University)

Two cross-cutting debates about development are preoccupying officials, academics and civil society groups in the middle of this decade. One concerns the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), due to expire at the end of 2015. Some describe them as the most successful poverty eradication effort ever, others as a fraud or abysmal failure. The other debate is about the formulation of the MDGs\’ successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 and meant to guide development efforts until 2030. What goals, targets and indicators should be included in the final document? Who should be involved in the drafting process and how?

Symposion is inviting contributions that enrich the ongoing debates on the SDGs and related concepts, theories, policies, methodologies and practice. This special issue aims to illuminate the conceptual, institutional, systemic and procedural frameworks underpinning the new goals. The number of SDGs proposed, 17, constitutes a substantial increase from the 8 MDGs and will pose a serious challenge to the international community. At the same time, the expansion of areas covered by the proposed SDGs invites critical reflection. The participation of a wide web of local, national, and international organizations, both in the implementation of the MDGs and in the preparatory process of the SDGs, reflects a rich fabric of stakeholders and of policy choices and practices. How responsive is the process through which the SDGs are shaped to the current global realities, to the local realities of developing countries and to the experience with the MDGs? What are the structural implications of adopting such goals and what are the institutional preconditions for achieving them? What would an effective monitoring and accountability mechanism for the SDGs look like? How do the SDGs differ from the MDGs, and what impact might these differences have? How do the SDGs fit into the broader UN post-2015 development agenda? What are the major challenges to their implementation? We welcome interdisciplinary work addressing these and related questions.

Paper Requirements and Deadline

For this special issue, the desired essay length is 8,000 words, including footnotes and references. The editors reserve the right to ask the authors to shorten their texts when necessary. All submitted articles must have a short abstract not exceeding 200 words and 3 to 6 keywords. Authors are asked to compile their manuscripts in the following order: title, abstract, keywords, main text, appendices (if any), references. All manuscripts submitted for the special issue should be in English. More details are available here.

Please submit your manuscripts electronically by the 1st of June 2015 to symposion.journal@yahoo.com. Authors will receive an e-mail confirming the submission. All subsequent correspondence with the authors will be by e-mail. When a paper is co-authored, one author should be identified as the corresponding author.

ASAP is launching a petition campaign calling on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to support the inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of robust targets for curbing tax dodging. Having published the results of a Delphi study examining the policies that would make the greatest impact on illicit financial flows if included in the SDGs, ASAP is calling on members to join in advocating the inclusion of these policies in the new development framework.

The open letter to the Secretary General has been signed by more than 50 experts in tax and development. Their names and the open letter text appear below. To join them in calling for strong action on tax-related illicit financial flows, visit ASAP\’s petition page on Avaaz.org.

For questions about the campaign or the Delphi study, contact Global Coordinator Rachel Payne at rachel@academicsstand.org.

His Excellency Ban Ki-moon
United Nations Secretary-General
United Nations Secretariat
New York, NY 10017

Dear Mr. Secretary General:

We, members of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) and other poverty researchers, advocates, teachers, and students, urge you to support the inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of a robust goal to curb tax abuse by building transparency into the international financial system. We have held expert consultations to determine how the SDGs can best curtail tax abuse and now write to offer some expert-vetted proposals.

Tax abuse constitutes a massive headwind against development. One common form of it is trade misinvoicing, used by multinational corporations (MNCs) to shift funds to affiliates in other jurisdictions that tax profits at lower rates or not at all. The think tank Global Financial Integrity estimates that $4.7 trillion were thus siphoned out of developing countries during the 2002-2011 period, $760 billion in 2011 alone.^[1] This is five or six times the sum total of all official development assistance flowing into these countries during the same periods.^[2] These numbers have been increasing at a rate of 8.6% per year. And they don’t even include other important forms of MNC abusive transfer pricing that are difficult to quantify. Even so, Christian Aid calculates that governments of developing countries have lost tax revenues of around $160 billion annually — about $2.5 trillion for the 2000-2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) period.^[3] \”If that money was available to allocate according to current spending patterns, the amount going into health services could save the lives of 350,000 children under the age of five every year.\”

Tax abuse is also practiced by wealthy citizens of developing countries. Boston Consulting Group estimates that 33% of all private financial wealth owned by people in Africa and the Middle East and 26% of such wealth owned by Latin Americans — some $2.6 trillion in total — is kept abroad. On conservative assumptions, this translates into revenue losses of $26 billion annually just for these two continents, and the problem is larger still for Asia.^[4]

The SDGs have the potential to catalyze global action to stop tax abuse. We commend the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals for including tax abuse in their SDG draft. However, because of the crucial role of tax abuse in perpetuating poverty, underdevelopment, and global inequality, we believe that their draft needs to be improved in this respect. As it is, tax abuse is barely mentioned. Target 16.4 says that illicit financial flows should be reduced and Target 17.1 calls on the world\’s governments to: \”Strengthen domestic resource mobilization, including through international support to developing countries to improve domestic capacity for tax and other revenue collection.\” These vague wishes fail to address the structural roots of illicit financial flows and are therefore unlikely to deliver the dramatic reduction in tax abuse necessary for the achievement of the SDGs.

ASAP recently completed a Delphi study on how the SDGs can best address the problem of illicit financial flows.^[5] Twenty-seven experts from various backgrounds – including academia, the private sector and national and international governmental and nongovernmental organizations – participated in the study, which revealed overwhelming expert support for policies to increase financial transparency at both the domestic and global levels. The experts agreed that the SDGs should call on all governments to mandate:

• that each company, trust or foundation disclose the natural person(s) who own or control it,
• 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,
• 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,
• that corporations publicly report on funds they pay to governments for the extraction of natural resources,
• 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.

In addition, the experts agreed that governments themselves should commit to:

• harmonizing anti-money laundering regulations internationally and
• 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.

Curbing illicit financial outflows from developing countries is a human rights issue. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the \”right to a standard of living that is adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one\’s family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond one’s control.\” These rights remain unfulfilled for much of the world\’s population. About half of all human beings suffer serious deprivations of one such kind or another and lack access to the necessary social services that would protect them.

The first-line responsibility for these human rights deficits lies with the governments of the countries in which the poorer half live. But many of these lack the resources to meet those obligations. The envisioned reforms would help developing countries attain the revenues necessary to safeguard their citizens\’ human rights. This effort would achieve much more than the foreign aid envisioned by the SDGs; and for many developing countries this step toward basic global justice would mean more than any amount of charity.

Curbing tax abuse would make a crucial contribution toward achieving the whole SDG agenda. We therefore urge you to work for strong targets on tax and illicit financial flows, in your Synthesis Report and throughout the coming year of intergovernmental negotiations. As an international network of academics, ASAP stands ready to support you in this important endeavor.

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.

Signed on 5-25 September 2014 by:

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

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

[1] Dev Kar and Brian LeBlanc, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2002-2011 (Washington, Global Financial Integrity, December 2013), pp. iii, vii, x. Also available at http://iff.gfintegrity.org/iff2013/2013report.html.

[2] See http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/SeriesDetail.aspx?srid=569&crid=.

[3] Christian Aid, False Profits: Robbing the Poor to Keep the Rich Tax-Free (Christian Aid, March 2009), p. 3, also available at https://www.christianaid.org.uk/Images/false-profits.pdf.

[4] Boston Consulting Group, “Global Wealth 2013: Maintaining Momentum in a Complex World,” 4 and 11, available at http://www.bcg.de/documents/file135355.pdf. Asia-Pacific wealth kept offshore is estimated at $2.1 trillion.

[5] http://academicsstand.org/2014/09/policy-options-for-addressing-illicit-financial-flows-results-from-a-delphi-study/.

ASAP researchers recently completed a study, examining expert opinion on how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can make the greatest possible impact on the problem of illicit financial flows. The study results show overwhelming expert support for greater transparency in the global financial system and underline the need for global cooperation around a common agenda of reforms. The current proposal for the SDGs, put forward by the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, does not include many of the reforms seen as most desirable by the study participants.

In the coming weeks, ASAP will launch a global petition, highlighting the study results and calling for robust SDG targets that would help end tax-related illicit financial flows by building transparency into the international financial system.

The study used the Delphi technique, in which a group of experts respond anonymously to a series of questionnaires, and after each round, a summary of the results is sent back to the group. Participants were encouraged to revise their original responses in light of others’ answers, and over a series of rounds, group judgment was derived. 27 experts from academia, NGOs, multilateral organizations, and the private sector took part in the study.

In the study, 10 policy options were identified as being highly desirable for inclusion in the SDG framework. They are, in order of desirability:

1. Require disclosure of the ultimate beneficial owners of companies, and of the controlling parties of trusts and foundations
2. Reform international tax rules so that the taxable profits of multinational corporations are aligned with the location of their economic activity
3. Require public reporting of funds paid to governments for the sale of natural resources such as oil, gas, metals, and minerals, and the use of those funds
4. Significantly increase developing country tax authority capacity
5. Implement automatic exchange of tax-relevant financial information on a global basis
6. Implement public country-by-country reporting for multinational corporations
7. Require that all governments carry out clear, reliable, frequent, and timely public fiscal reporting and that governments\’ fiscal policy-making process be open to public participation
8. Increase capacity building, training, and resources for law enforcement for work on financial sector investigations
9. Impose tougher sanctions, including jail time, on professionals who facilitate illicit financial flows, e.g. senior officers from global banks, accounting firms, law firms, insurance firms, and hedge funds
10. Harmonize anti-money laundering regulations internationally.

Other study results include participant’s assessment of the likelihood of various policies being included in the SDG framework.

The study was funded with donations raised during ASAP’s crowdfunding campaign, Stop IFFs 2015, which was carried out last summer.

The report is available for download here.

Despite some clear positives, the draft text of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) does not fulfill its self-proclaimed purpose of inspiring and guiding a concerted international effort to eradicate severe poverty everywhere in all its forms. We offer some critical comments on the proposed agreement and suggest eight ways to embolden the goals and amplify their appeal and moral power.

The final meeting of the Open Working Group for Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) took place in mid-July. Ahead of the meeting, ASAP sent the OWG co-chairs, Mr. Csaba Kõrösi, Permanent Representative of Hungary, and Mr. Macharia Kamau, Permanent Representative of Kenya, a letter calling for global cooperation for financial transparency to be a priority in the OWG\’s Zero Draft for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

ASAP\’s letter was informed by a survey of over 28 experts, which aimed to identify policy reforms that would do the most to reduce illicit financial flows if included in the SDG framework. One of the background assumptions of the study is that if the framework does not make states responsible for taking specific actions to combat illicit financial flows, it will fall short of its potential impact. The study uses the Delphi method for identifying expert and stakeholder consensus around the desirability and likelihood of various policy reforms being included in the SDGs.

Although the initial version of the OWG\’s Zero Draft included a target for global cooperation to reduce international tax evasion and avoidance, the target was cut in a revision of the draft. This is concerning because one of the clearest results of the study is that there is overwhelming expert support for policies that would increase financial transparency at both the domestic and global levels in order to curb tax avoidance and evasion, such as

• disclosure of the ultimate beneficial owners of companies and of the controlling parties of trusts and foundations;
• public country-by-country reporting of profits and other tax-relevant information by multinational corporations;
• automatic exchange of tax-relevant financial information by national tax authorities worldwide; and
• public reporting on funds paid to governments for the extraction of natural resources such as oil, gas, metals and minerals, and on the use of those funds.

ASAP calls on the OWG to strengthen its Zero Draft incorporating a target for international cooperation for transparency to curb tax abuse. To read ASAP\’s letter to the OWG co-chairs, click here.

The final results of ASAP\’s study will be published later this summer. ASAP will continue to campaign for the inclusion of policy reforms that would curb illicit financial flows in the negotiation of the new framework.

The United Nations\’ proposed global goals for poverty reduction miss much of the story when it comes to trade-related illicit flows — which drain tens of billions of dollars from the world\’s poorest countries ever year. A new ASAP study identifies a set of simple reforms that could drastically reduce such outflows and can guide the UN\’s efforts as it develops its new Sustainable Development Goals.