[Content from Tax Justice Network site here]
The Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) is the world’s most comprehensive assessment of the secrecy of financial centers and the impact of that secrecy on global financial flows.
The 2022 edition of the Tax Justice Network’s biennial Financial Secrecy Index sees some of the world’s biggest economies climb up the ranking. The US dramatically expanded the gulf between itself and the rest of the world by enabling the biggest supply of financial secrecy ever recorded by the index – nearly twice as much as the second-biggest supplier currently on the index, Switzerland. Germany, which is hosting tomorrow’s G7 finance ministers meeting and now ranks 7th, returned to the top 10 after dropping to 14th in 2020. Japan, which returned to the top 10 in 2020, has continued to climb the index, now ranking 6th.
- United States
- Switzerland
- Singapore
- Hong Kong
- Luxembourg
- Japan
- Germany
- United Arab Emirates
- British Virgin Islands (British Overseas Territory)
- Guernsey (British Crown Dependency)
The Financial Secrecy Index ranks each country based on how intensely the country’s financial and legal system allows individuals to hide and launder money extracted from around the world. The index grades each country’s financial and legal system with a secrecy score out of 100 where a score of 0 is full transparency and a score of 100 is full secrecy. The country’s secrecy score is then combined with the volume of financial services the country provides to non-residents to determine how much financial secrecy is supplied to the world by the country.
A higher rank on the index does not necessarily mean a jurisdiction has more secretive laws, but rather that the jurisdiction plays a bigger role globally in enabling banking secrecy, anonymous shell company ownership, anonymous real estate ownership or other forms of financial secrecy, which in turn enable money laundering, tax evasion and the evasion of sanctions. A highly secretive jurisdiction that provides very little financial services to non-residents, like Maldives (ranked 91st), will rank below a moderately secretive jurisdiction that is a major offshore destination, like Luxembourg (ranked 5th).
Continue reading the note HERE.
To see the results from the Financial Secrecy Index 2022, visit their website HERE.