Engineers Without Borders Panel on "Illicit Financial Flows"

Tomorrow I will be participating on a panel on "Illicit Financial Flows" at the Engineers Without Borders 2015 National Conference, currently taking place in Montreal. The goal of the session is to discuss the nature and impact of so-called illicit financial flows in Canada, the United States, and the world's developing countries.

I have been asked to address the question "what promising policy instruments or reforms could potentially curb outflows of illicit finance?" The use of the term illicit in this context seems to be an attempt to elide the distinction between avoidance and evasion. Those familiar with my work know that I approach this terminology with caution because I think it is a mistake to conflate evasion and avoidance into a single category for purposes of advocating generalized policy reform. In a paper I published last year on Evasion, Avoidance, and Taxpayer Morality, I argued why I think the phenomenon of tax evasion is distinct from tax avoidance, each represents a different type of governance failure, and each requires a tailored response. But I certainly understand the instinct to see both tax avoidance and tax evasion as essentially drains on public resources that we'd like to imagine would otherwise be available for various socially useful projects.

I'll try to lay out the field as I see it in the time allotted. It is a big topic to cover in a limited time. I suppose I could just plug Martin Hearson's very good work on this subject. I am curious as to how Engineers Without Borders came to concern itself with this issue; the rest of the conference focuses on innovative, sustainable, and inclusive development.  I think it is another sign that tax justice advocacy groups, like the Tax Justice Network, are successfully inducing NGOs across a broad spectrum to view taxation as a human rights issue that permeates all facets of social and economic development.