Requiring public official to disclose their assets, income, and other information about their personal finances can be an important tool for curbing corruption — as any number of posts on this blog have shown (examples here, here, and here. The program’s effectiveness depends crucially on the ability to verify the disclosures’ accuracy and in particular the ease with which verifiers can determine if an official has hidden assets abroad. A new Treaty greatly facilitates this task. Its ratification should be at the top of national anticorruption authorities to do list.

GAB is pleased to publish this guest post explaining the Treaty and its origins authored by Tilman Hoppe, an international expert on asset declarations, who played the critical role in the Treaty’s development.

Effective August 23, 2024, North Macedonia has ratified the “International Treaty on Exchange of Data for the Verification of Asset Declarations.” By doing so, North Macedonia has written history. The Treaty is the first and only mechanism for cross-border data exchange for the verification of asset declarations. Three more countries have signed the Treaty and will now have to catch up in ratifying. Other countries are about to sign – any country may join the Treaty, as may the European Union as a bloc.

The Treaty addresses the following gap: Corrupt public officials hide their wealth abroad. At the same time, bodies verifying asset declarations lack access to data abroad. This is the number one reason cited by verification bodies to explain why they can only unlock a fraction of asset declarations’ potential: Following wealth usually stops at domestic borders. Neither the UNCAC nor any other international treaty address this problem.

A significant advance in international efforts to curb corruption, the Treaty emerged from an unlikely set of circumstances: