Financial Secrecy Index – Tax Justice Network (original) (raw)

The Financial Secrecy Index is a ranking of jurisdictions most complicit in helping individuals to hide their finances from the rule of law.

Financial secrecy facilitates tax abuse, enables money laundering and undermines the human rights of all. The index identifies the world’s biggest suppliers of financial secrecy and spotlights the laws that governments can change to reduce their contribution to financial secrecy.

1

Investigates how much financial secrecy the jurisdiction’s laws allow, indicated by a
Secrecy Score out of 100.

2

Identifies how much financial services the jurisdiction supplies to residents of other countries, indicated by the Global Scale Weight.

3

Combines Secrecy Score and Global Scale Weight to determine how much financial secrecy the jurisdiction supplies, indicated by FSI value.

Jurisdictions are ranked by their FSI value to identify the world’s biggest suppliers of financial secrecy.

A bigger supplier of financial secrecy doesn’t always mean a more secretive jurisdiction.

Unlike tax haven blacklists which usually only factor in laws, the index more accurately captures how laws and financial activity intersect in the real world to create secrecy.

Panama is more secretive than the UK but the UK is used far more often as a destination for offshore wealth, making the UK a bigger supplier of secrecy in practice.