World Financial Secrecy Index 2018

The Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their offshore financial activities.  A politically neutral ranking, it is a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows or capital flight. Some of the criteria used to build the index include the absence of a public register, harmful tax residency rules and whether the system allows for bearer shares, which obscure ownership.

An estimated $21 to $32 trillion of private financial wealth is located, untaxed or lightly taxed, in secrecy jurisdictions around the world. Secrecy jurisdictions - a term we often use as an alternative to the more widely used term tax havens - use secrecy to attract illicit and illegitimate or abusive financial flows.

Switzerland and the United States are the biggest promoters of financial secrecy according to the Tax Justice Network (TJN). Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Germany, Taiwan, the UAE and Guernsey rounded out the list’s top ten. 

The Financial Secrecy Index reveals that traditional stereotypes of tax havens are misconceived. The world’s most important providers of financial secrecy harboring looted assets are mostly not small, palm-fringed islands as many suppose, 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.