"Key provisions of the proposals which are not acceptable from the point of view of important public interests include: a prohibition of requirements to hold data locally; a prohibition of otherwise regulating cross-border data transfers; a prohibition of requiring a local presence for goods/service providers in the country; and a prohibition of requiring open source software in government procurement contracts. It is also proposed that there be no border taxes on digital products.
Furthermore, it is being proposed to effectively give the WTO jurisdiction to adjudicate whether a national technology or data regulation was “reasonable,” “objective,” “transparent,” and “not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service.” WTO’s adjudication processes have historically tended to favour commercial interests, and giving them a blanket supervision of technology/ data regulation may go against governments’ obligation to ensure that services are operated in the public interest and respect human rights and freedoms
In addition, discussions in WTO and in so-called free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations are neither transparent nor inclusive, thus resulting in decisions that do not take into account the interests of all concerned parties. The processes are overly influenced by big business interests."
By Leila Ueberschlag, October 27, 2016 at 9:51 am.
Since 2012, 15MpaRato, an organized citizen collective based in Barcelona, has been uncovering some of the largest corruption cases that are shaking Spanish politics since the 2008 financial crisis, and is a good example of fighting the impunity of financial corruption.
Apple was the recipient of illegal tax breaks from Ireland. That was the finding today of a European Union (EU) Commission investigation into the tech giant’s business and tax practices. The result? The company has been ordered to pay €13 billion ($14.5 billion U.S.), plus interest, to settle back taxes owed to Ireland.
Glenn Greenwald: illegality was never the crux of the scandal triggered by those NSA revelations. Instead, what was most shocking was what had been legalized: the secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless spying in human history. ... Panama Papere ... Some of these documents undoubtedly reveal criminality: either monies that were illegally obtained (and are being hidden for that reason) or assets being concealed in order to criminally evade tax debts. But the crux of this activity — placing assets offshore in order to avoid incurring tax liability — has been legalized.
By T.C. Sottek on February 23, 2016 in The Verge
The funny thing about the FBI and tech writers accusing Apple of refusing to hack the iPhone as a "marketing strategy" is that siding with terrorists is a bad strategy. Apple is not doing that, of...
Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, has called for a boycott of Apple until it cooperates with the FBI.
Yle Talous 8.1.2014 klo 16:35 | päivitetty 8.1.2014 klo 16:35
Fortum: Hollanti ja Belgia eivät ole veroparatiiseja
Kansalaisjärjestö Finnwatchin veroparatiisiselvityksessä yhdeksi esimerkkitapaukseksi valikoitunut energiayhtiö Fortum katsoo, etteivät sen tytäryhtiöiden kotimaana toimivat Hollanti ja Belgia ole veroparatiiseja. Fortum myös pitää itseään veroraportoinnin edelläkävijänä.
'm interested in
designing technologies to support collective intelligence.
computational analysis of effective collaboration and deliberation.
the intersection of artificial intelligence, politics, and economics.
These are all the same problem to me.
Slate, "But as shocking as Volkswagen’s fraud may be, it only heralds more of its kind. It’s time to address one of the most urgent if overlooked tech transparency issues—secret code in the criminal justice system. Today, closed, proprietary software can put you in prison or even on death row. And in most U.S. jurisdictions you still wouldn’t have the right to inspect it. In short, prosecutors have a Volkswagen problem."
"Europe’s highest court on Tuesday struck down an international agreement that allowed companies to move digital information like people’s web search histories and social media updates between the European Union and the United States. The decision left the international operations of companies like Google and Facebook in a sort of legal limbo even as their services continued working as usual."
Of course, a republic can’t run without authorities who follow the rule of law. Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy firms now flouting basic employment and anti-discrimination laws would like us to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance, rather than segregationists’ massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful, nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”.
: Nyt veronkiertopykälän rajat pitäisi testata | Yle Uutiset | yle.fi
Metson viime keväänä eläköitynyt talousjohtaja Reijo Kostiainen (63) jättää selvityspyynnön verohallinnon tiskille Sörnäisissä. Kostiaisen laskelmien mukaan valtioenemmistöinen Fortum Oyj on saanut vuodesta 2008 lähtien Belgian rahoitusyhtiöjärjestelyillään noin 400 miljoonan euron verohyödyn. Kostianen sanoo Ajankohtaiselle kakkoselle, että Suomen talous ei kestä yhteisöverotuksen vapaamatkustajia.
A global coalition of civil society organizations and governments working to address inequalities in the financial system that penalize billions of people.
The Coalition advocates five core recommendations to improve transparency and accountability:
1 Curtailment of mispricing in trade imports and exports – this includes both abusive transfer pricing between multinational enterprises and intentionally mispriced transactions between unrelated parties;
2 Country-by-country accounting of sales, profits, and taxes paid by multinational corporations;
3 Transparency of beneficial ownership of corporations and trusts;
4 Automatic cross-border exchange of tax information on personal and business accounts; and
5 Harmonization of predicate offenses under anti-money laundering laws across all Financial Action Task Force cooperating countries.
TJN doesn't very often publish press releases verbatim, but we feel we really must publicise this forthcoming book by Richard Brooks, a former UK tax inspector and well known investigative journalist who has broken many of the tax scandals that have made national headlines in recent years
At the end of August prosecutors from international tribunals met in Jamestown, NY for the 2010 International Humanitarian Law Dialogues. The discussion focused on the June review conference of the International Criminal Court in Kampala, Uganda, long awa
An article by Alyn Ware, IALANA. This momentum is being supported and maintained at the UN General Assembly, primarily through the draft resolution A/C.1/65/L.50, “Follow-up to the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Legality of
The Senate passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (S. 372) on Friday, December, 10th, by unanimous consent... There are two poison pills in the bill that fundamentally undermine the small advances in the bill. There is still time to fix the b
What those who demand a man’s murder are doing, however, is not merely stating facts or lies, opinions or observations. In voicing what the philosopher J. L. Austin called “performative utterances,” they are acting. These are not statements that can be tr
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Cl
I denna undersökning betraktas yttrandefriheten, skyddet för hedern och privatlivet samt källskyddet i Sverige, Norge och Nederländerna. Regleringen och rättspraxis i dessa länder jämförs med lagstiftningen och rättspraxis i Finland. Den europeiska konven
The modern global economy doesn’t just run on fossil fuels, writes Bob Hughes, it primarily driven by social and economic inequality. But as a growing number of studies suggests that this inequality also has a heavy environmental cost, Hughes argues that
Yash Tandon: " Libya is a neo-colonial state; it is imperial finance capital which, despite contradictions, is in effective control of the state and its economy. Gaddafi has been an unwilling neo-colonial dictator for finance capital, with a rather utopia
It claims the role in the Greek debt crisis of endemic tax evasion through offshore centres is being downplayed because the big powers in the G20 – the US, the UK, and Germany – are also key beneficiaries of tax havens, as the index shows Luxembourg is accused by the TJN of being the "death star" superweapon in the world of tax havens because of its aggressive defence of financial secrecy and its resistance to EU efforts to close tax loopholes. It wins its place thanks to the sheer size and range of financial and secrecy services it provides, accounting for 13% of global offshore financial services, compared with Switzerland, 6%, and Caymans, 4%. The UK mainland has 20% and the US 21% of offshore services.
Friday, November 25, 2011 Tax evasion is worth $3.1 trillion a year - over 5% of its GDP The Tax Justice Network issues the following press release today: Huge Cost of Tax Evasion Revealed as Campaign to Tackle Tax Havens Launches New research published by the Tax Justice Network shows that tax evasion costs 145 countries, representing over 98% of world GDP, more than US$3.1 trillion annually.
"Tax evasion equals 18 percent of global tax collections, a new report by British accountant Richard Murphy shows. His report for the Tax Justice Network cleverly lined up a World Bank Report on the size of shadow economies with a Heritage Foundation report on average tax burdens by country to reach that figure."