Monthly Archives: July 2014

Illicit Financial Flows: Tax Fraud, Evasion, Avoidance, Abuse, Mitigation, and Planning

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Thanks to high profile reports by Global Integrity, Eurodad, the OECD, and the African High Level Panel spotlighting losses developing countries suffer from the manipulation of tax laws and other forms of illicit financial flows, questions about “tax fraud,” “tax evasion,” “tax avoidance,” and “tax abuse” are now on the development policy agenda.  These terms and their equivalents in other languages are, with the exception of “tax fraud,” ambiguous — sometimes used to mean actions that are unlawful and sometimes used to refer to legal ones.  Before the debate on how to ensure developing countries receive the tax revenues they are due goes any farther, it may be helpful to explain how the ambiguity arises. Continue reading →

A Greater Role for HR and Ethics Screening in Corporate Anticorruption Compliance?

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In my last post, I discussed recent research suggesting that combating corruption in government bureaucracies requires attention to the selection of personnel – trying to recruit not only the most capable, but also the most honest.  Might the general principle apply to private corporations?  Should corporate compliance programs place more emphasis than they do on assessing candidates’ integrity at the selection stage (initial hiring or subsequent promotion)?  And should law enforcement consider a firm’s efforts at integrity screening when assessing the adequacy of a firm’s compliance program?  I don’t have the answers to these questions – I simply don’t know enough about human resource management issues – but I want to raise them in the hopes of starting a discussion of the issue.

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