The Mapping the Faultlines project is based on the contention that the mechanisms that allow illicit financial flows to occur result from a synergistic relationship between the world’s secrecy jurisdictions and its secrecy providers (usually accountants, lawyers and bankers) who create the structures that these jurisdictions facilitate. Inherent in the work is an assumption that an alternative is possible: that if there was increased financial transparency it would be much harder to hide illicit financial flows, and that in turn the volume of such flows would decrease.
The Mapping the Faultlines project is not seeking to offer policy solutions to the problems it identifies at this time: these will be offered at a later date. It does, however, seem inappropriate that it address issues of secrecy and the problems it creates unless the alternative of transparency, and the merits it can deliver, is considered.
This paper seeks to do just that, both by exploring the arguments for transparency and what the resulting benefits might be of achieving it, and by describing what transparency would look like if it were to exist. In doing so this paper seeks to do more than describe what is, it seeks to describe what should be. Yet this is not an exercise in determining what ought to be so, based on examples from current best practice: this paper suggests that there is an ideal form of financial transparency to which we should aspire, and sets out what that might be. Without seeking to establish this ideal it is suggested that any eventual policy proposal this work might give rise to will fall short of the goal to which society should aspire.
