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It is often argued that some wealthy people stay wealthy because they evade taxes and hide their assets well.

If you have the bucks, then the world is your oyster; opening up the global stage of secret financial services that keeps your money safe so that it can grow into a tidy nest egg.

The best countries to hide wealth have now been revealed by the Tax Justice Network, which, per Bloomberg, ranked countries by the extent their financial and legal systems help people and entities conceal ownership of assets.

According to the research, the United States leads the charge in helping individuals hide their wealth.

In fact, the US has increased its supply of financial secrecy to the world by almost a third since 2020.

Thus it has earned the worst rating since rankings began in 2009:

Image: Bloomberg

The Financial Secrecy Index works on a score of 100, with countries that score 0 being fully transparent and those that score 100 being fully secret.

The score is then added to the volume of financial services the country provides to non-residents to determine how much financial secrecy is supplied to the world by the country.

Ian Gary, executive director at the US-based Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition, said that the ranking is revealing how “corrupt actors are weaponising our financial system against democracy”.

He added that the US needs to do more to support a “reciprocal automatic information exchange between countries”:

The Tax Justice Network said the US’s worsening score was driven by its refusal to exchange information with other countries’ tax authorities. If the US changed its approach to the one used by other major economies, it would cut its supply of financial secrecy to the world by 40%, the report said.

Five of the G7 nations – the US, UK, Japan, Germany, and Italy – supply an eighth of global financial secrecy:

“A small club of rich countries setting global rules on finance and tax are found to be the ones most responsible for facilitating financial secrecy and tax abuses,” said Moran Harari, lead researcher at the Tax Justice Network.

“For decades, rich G-7 countries courted billionaires, oligarchs and corporate giants with secrecy loopholes and eyes-wide-shut-regulations.”

A whopping $10 trillion of wealth is estimated to be held offshore, according to the network.

That’s more than 2,5 times the value of all dollar and euro bills currently circulating the world.

Yikes, it’s difficult to compute.

[source:bloomberg]