How Banks help the Super Rich hide 20 Trillion Dollars Overseas

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-banks-help-super-rich-hide-over-20-trillion-offshore-accounts?akid=12819.294211.ZJLMYi&rd=1&src=newsletter1032328&t=27

Well, we've estimated at Tax Justice Network $21-$32 trillion offshore. About a third of that is from developing countries. That's just financial assets owned by individuals. We assume that more than 95 percent of that is not being reported to the home authorities.
In addition to that, there's an enormous amount of corporate tax dodging that goes on using offshore havens, companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft parking intellectual property offshore. And if you add all this up, it's at least a couple of billion dollars a year of tax revenue that should be paid to the home countries. How that's distributed exactly between developing countries and the rich countries like the United States is something that needs more work. But it's a big number. The United States estimate for quite a long time has been $100 billion per year of lost tax revenue due to the offshore segment.


The first stage, though, I think, is for ordinary citizens to understand just how much their own tax bills are being inflated by this unacceptable behavior by corporations and wealthy individuals, who just happened to have big bankers as their friends. So I think the first stage of this is education. Citizens have to get involved in this. We're in a period here which is very much like the Gilded Age of the 1890s, when wealth inequality was soaring, when both political parties are inundated with corporate money. And we need to have a kind of progressive movement that revives the demand for transparency in government and for cleaning up this kind of really unacceptable behavior on the part of the elites.