The Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) presented its latest report, which sets out the practical path to a global asset register, at a virtual press conference on Tuesday 19 April. ICRICT commissioners Gabriel Zucman and Jayati Ghosh, and its chair José Antonio Ocampo, have issued an urgent call to G20 finance ministers to establish a global asset register to tackle hidden wealth.
The idea is to target all oligarchs as well as all forms of wealth hidden from the tax authorities and the general public, and concealed in jurisdictions with high levels of financial opacity. “Financial wealth is much more important today than it used to be, but wealth registers have not been updated to take it into account”, lamented Gabriel Zucman. “Existing information on asset ownership, if combined with consistent information on beneficial ownership, would constitute a powerful core of information to be included in a global asset register”, wrote the trio in their open letter.
ICRICT has prepared a practical roadmap for the implementation of this global asset register, with five steps: - introduce beneficial ownership requirements for companies, trusts and all types of legal vehicles and on “classic” types of wealth such as real estate; - link registers of different asset classes at national level to existing beneficial ownership registers; - extend beneficial ownership registration to all types of legal vehicles available and to all classes of assets; - begin to centralise national data on beneficial ownership into a single source; - collect existing information at regional level, for example through the creation of a task force focussing on beneficial ownership.
To read the report (in French): https://aeur.eu/f/1am (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)