Financial Secrecy Index

[howmayiannoyyou]

Reality check:

- US haven status undermines despotic regimes by denying them data on citizens hedging their bets with offshore accounts. This provides the US leverage, intelligence, foreign direct investment & tax revenue.

- Offshore dollar pools (eg. Eurodollars) are problem enough for the US Treasury & FED's monetary policy. Absent US haven status this problem would be far worse.

- The secrecy doesn't much apply to US citizen and less so once the Democrat's $600 bank account reporting requirement is passed into law.

[mahkeiro]

Realty check: US forced FACTA on many countries but never offered reciprocity. Tax haven status apply to all non US citizen, so this leverage exists for many of the US "allies" (btw as a European î don’t believe that such a concept exists) like all OECD countries that have to fight against complex tax evasion schema thanks to the US. What the world want is reciprocity.

[melony]

Ah, so it's not money laundering when we are the ones doing it.

[billiam]

Either erroneous conclusion or made in bad faith. The despotic regimes (like Jordan, Russia, Kenya, and many others) are some of the biggest launderers, according to the Pandora Papers! These regimes are propped up by the United States trust law race to the bottom, not undermined by it. It's an internationalized criminal enterprise.

[sparkling]

> data on citizens hedging their bets with offshore accounts

Just to be clear: in the majority of EU countries, it is perfectly legal for a private person to have a bank account overseas. Be it in the US, Panama or somewhere in central Africa. There is also no requirement to report such account.

[eutropia]

I clicked on the US and see that it gets loads of secrecy points in all kinds of categories, but 0 points from the category of "Consistent Personal Income Tax".

I laughed.

[throwaway6EQUJ5]

I skimmed through the PDF about germany and found this interesting bit

>This [federal competition] has repeatedly served as an excuse to engage in ruinous intra-German ‘tax wars’ for lax enforcement, auditing and the hiring and staffing of local tax authorities.6

which i never heard of. So i check the source and got got redirected to just an image.

>http://www.taxjustice.net/topics/race-to-the-bottom/tax-wars...

Some of the listed sources there (https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/Germany.pdf) are broken but not all, some do link to actual credible thrid parties.

[cookiengineer]

Honestly this index seems flawed. Where's Monaco, Malta, or Liechtenstein?

When we speak of finances, these countries are the top of the top and literally where politicians from all over the world hide their money.

[Uberphallus]

Monaco is impractical for most tax evasion purposes, since most advantages require to be resident. If you're not resident, Monegasque banks will send your financial information to the country where you're resident. Malta, Liechtenstein, or most "classic" European havens are largely the same: within the EEA your residence country will have all the bank information about you.

They sure have advantageous tax rates to promote certain types of residency/investment, but the financial secrecy isn't really there, which is what this index is about.

[sellyme]

#109, #18, and #52 respectively.

The website provides extremely extensive breakdowns of the exact index contributors for each country, presumably those will illuminate why the rankings are what they are.

[helloworld11]

Excellent ranking for those wishing to have a reasonably well researched list of candidate countries for where they could place their hidden funds and avoid future taxes. Bravo.

[ccity88]

realistically you need a decent level of wealth to participate in these tax havens. It's expensive to hire a lawyer who knows this stuff, and even more expensive for administration and execution. The people who have the level of wealth to pay for this are already doing it.

[top_sigrid]

Well, researching and listing reality is probably not the problem here.

[_uy6i]

This is pretty stupid if you ask me, the top of the list is just stable countries with a strong tradition of rule of law.

[Tehdasi]

Of course, those are two prime characteristics you want in a tax haven. You want it to have rule of law since you don't want your money/assets/secrets expropriated or exposed, and you don't want a new regime to come in to do the previous for their benefit. Just as long as the haven is concerned about their laws, not other countries laws.

[ksdale]

Haha I thought the same thing. The more I read it, the more it seemed like a list of countries where there's actually due process, even for the bad guys.

[xmcqdpt2]

Mainly it's countries with easily setup legal anonymous LLPs or without directories of ownership, that are economically stable and where there is little political pressure (internal or external) to decrease secrecy. Lack of internal pressure is common when the country strongly benefits from being an offshore secrecy location (Switzerland, Singapore, HK) or when it's not very susceptible to international pressure (US, UK).

Whether it's "stupid" or not depends on how much you weigh bank secrecy and privacy against the fight on money laundering, corruption, terrorism financing and sanctions evasion.

Either way, the degree of secrecy you get is also usually a lot higher if your assets are not in your home country, which means that bank privacy is much higher for the global rich.

[bjt2n3904]

Financial secrecy, or financial privacy?

[TacticalCoder]

I honestly don't know how to read it: does this mean that the Cayman Island, ranked 1st, are the most secretive or the less secretive in the world? (according to this ranking)

[Proven]

It's best for financial privacy. Good for them.

And equally so for anyone who escapes globalist & socialist busybodies like AOC and takes their money to a safe place.

[dveeden2]

NPR did a podcast where they setup a shell company and where they look into the top countries for this.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043746410/we-set-up-an-offsh...

[fblp]

Thanks for sharing! I setup a quarterly donation. This is important work.

[young_unixer]

And at rank 0: Monero.

[lucideer]

This is a great starting point, but things like BEPs mean this usually more complex than one country's sole secrecy index.

[trident5000]

More like a map of where oppressive regimes want total control over your finances.

[bojangleslover]

Private wealth has already been taxed unfortunately

[Proven]

That site is bullshit. Tax justice my ass. Globalist thugs.

Is there such a thing as Literal Secrecy? You know, when you share personal info with a provider and they aren't supposed to leak it? No, that's called privacy.

I live in one of the high ranked countries and I think the more financial privacy is available, the better. That's how it's supposed to be and if someone oppressed (financially or otherwise) from abroad uses local services to escape that oppression, good for them.

If you have a high tax or reckless spending problem that makes your people take their money out of YOUR country, spend less.

[echelon]

Russia and China score extremely well, and the US is the second worst?

Is it fine when the ruling class can get away with moving money?

Who funded this?

[tetromino_]

It's completely logical: the Russian and Chinese ruling classes want to hide their ill-gotten money from taxes, from journalists, and from being arbitrarily seized by greedy officials and well-connected rivals. Thus, they move money from the somewhat transparent Russian and Chinese institutions to the safety of more murky Western economies.

[kibibyte]

The US has a few states that allow you to set up a shell company with very pretty much no proof of identity. It’s one way that South Dakota is apparently a big tax haven now.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/03/1042885263/pandora-papers-wea...

Planet Money has done an episode on this sort of thing in the past where they found it much easier to open a shell business in the US vs the rest of the world. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043746410/we-set-up-an-offsh...

[ksdale]

Yes, the US is so secret we know exactly how much is hidden and where. Meanwhile Russia is so transparent, wealth hoarding oligarchs can't even exist. /s

[dgivney]

> Russia and China score extremely well, and the US is the second worst?

This is a list of countries that benefit from capital flight from countries such as Russia and China.

> Who funded this?

https://taxjustice.net/our-funders/

[skzv]

Not too surprising to me, honestly.

Wealthy Russians and Chinese are hiding their money in the West (UK, US, Canada) precisely for that reason. London (AKA Moscow-on-the-Thames) is famous for happily taking in and protecting that dirty money.

[adventured]

It's a pathetic joke. The US has very little real financial secrecy. The Feds have trivial access to all financial transactions inside of the US if they have cause to need to look. Beyond that, the majority of US wealth is contained in the stock market and land, both of which tend to reveal the wealthy due to public records (which is how we know how much land Bill Gates has been accumulating and how many shares of Tesla Elon Musk owns). The US has a small number of unknown super wealthy because of that, whereas China and Russia are extraordinarily opaque by comparison. The US also requires its politicians to report their wealth within a range. Now try to get that kind of information from Putin or Xi.

[collegeburner]

No we score extremely well and Russia and China are some of the worst. Privacy in finance is a great thing, KYC and reporting requirements are massive violations of privacy and intolerable.