Preface

• Author: David Kerzner, David W. Chodikoff
• Pages: 23-25

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Illegal tax practices such as tax evasion cost governments billions of dollars

in lost revenues. Countries like Canada, the United States, and the United

Kingdom rely on the ability to exchange information with tax havens and

other countries to administer their tax system and combat tax evasion. A

country that allows the rich and elite to hire professionals to hide their assets

of‌fshore so they can escape paying their share of taxes risks that its people

will question the fairness of the government’s revenue authority. More than

that, allowing of‌fshore tax evasion to go unchecked may call into question

the very legitimacy of the government’s taxing function and send a signal to

all taxpayers that it’s okay to cheat.

As explained in this book, where there is bank secrecy, there is often

a convergence of evil: international tax evasion, global f‌inancial crime, and

international terrorism. As Professor Arthur Cockf‌ield observes in his study

of the 2013 “big data” leak by the International Consortium of Investiga-

tive Journalists (ICIJ), of‌fshore service providers such as trust and f‌inance

companies take advantage of tax haven secrecy to help individuals engage

in global f‌inancial crime. Commenting on the guilty plea of BNP Paribas in

2014, US District Attorney Cyrus R Vance, Jr recognized that such shared val-

ues in the international community as human rights, peaceful coexistence,

and a world free of terror are dependent on the enforcement of our laws and,

in particular, on a banking system that is not permitted to be a conduit for

criminal activity. The string of global banking scandals from 2008 to 2015

and from UBS to HSBC connotes a code of conduct observed by executive

leaders that runs counter to such values, and is neither moral nor right. The

2016 announcement by the ICIJ of the Panama Papers, an additional leak

PREFACE