This exercise was not undertaken for curiosity’s sake. The ‘mapping’ in the project’s title required us first to evaluate which places contribute to the secrecy that facilitates illicit financial flows, including flows from developed to developing countries of up to US$1 trillion a year. Second, we needed to say how these jurisdictions contribute to the faultlines that enable those flows.
Elsewhere we define the meaning of the term 'secrecy jurisdiction', and in another paper we explain how we selected the secrecy jurisdictions surveyed in the Mapping the Faultlines project.
A secrecy jurisdiction is not a natural phenomenon that is, or is not, observable. All countries have some attributes of secrecy jurisdictions, ranging on an imagined continuum from highly secretive to perfectly transparent. Therefore, we have selected a set of indicators which allow an assessment to be based on how the legal and regulatory systems of a country or its dependent territories contribute to the secrecy that enables illicit financial flows.
This paper outlines the methodology we used to assess the contribution each location has made to the secrecy that facilitates illicit financial flows.
