WASHINGTON—The United States has fallen behind other developed countries in curbing financial secrecy, surpassing Switzerland as the “international banking center of choice for corrupt transactions,” according to a new report.
The report from the University of Sussex is based on data that spans four decades and covers more than 70 jurisdictions, and provides “an unprecedented view of how the structure of different types of illicit global financial networks have evolved” in response to changing regulations, according to ICIJ.com.
The researchers said they identified several long-term trends.
Do As I Say…
The first, according to the researchers, is that over the past two decades, Washington has “successfully lobbied its peers to reform their financial systems while failing to implement similar measures at home.”
The U.S. has “been very aggressive at imposing unilateral financial transparency in other places, especially Switzerland, but it really hasn’t reciprocated in banking information exchange,” Daniel Haberly, a professor of human geography at the university who led the research, told ICIJ. “It’s got fairly high financial secrecy, but it also seems to have pretty lax anti-money laundering compliance on top of that.”
‘Notable Uptick’
Starting around 2013, the researchers said, there was a notable uptick in the use of U.S. bank accounts in bribery cases recorded under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law meant to prevent corrupt payments to foreign officials. By comparison, the use of Swiss bank accounts in FCPA cases declined, the report said.