The Philippines ranked 40th or nearly at the upper third of the 112 countries and jurisdictions covered by a report by the global Tax Justice Network measuring financial secrecy, citing limits in accessing bank records.
The country was given a “secrecy score” of 65 percent in the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index, where scores of 31-40 percent were deemed “moderately secretive” and 91-100 percent were “exceptionally secretive.”
Tax Justice Network said “the secrecy score of 65 percent has been computed as the average score of 20 key financial secrecy indicators.”
In identifying the most important providers of international financial secrecy, the Financial Secrecy Index reveals that traditional stereotypes of tax havens are misconceived, according to the Tax Justice Network. It said the world’s most important providers of financial secrecy harboring looted assets were mostly not small, palm-fringed islands as many supposed, but “some of the world’s biggest and wealthiest countries.” Rich OECD member-countries and their satellites are the main recipients of or conduits for these illicit flows, it noted.
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It said the only realistic way to address these problems comprehensively was to tackle them at root: By directly confronting offshore secrecy and the global infrastructure that created it. A first step toward this goal, it said, was to identify as accurately as possible the jurisdictions that make it their business to provide offshore secrecy.
The top 10 jurisdictions in financial secrecy were Switzerland, the United States, Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Germany, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Guernsey.
“Financial secrecy is a key facilitator of financial crime and illicit financial flows, including money laundering, corruption and tax evasion. Jurisdictions who fail to contain it deny citizens elsewhere their human rights and exacerbate global inequality,” according to Tax Justice Network.
