Financial Secrecy Index

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The Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) is a report published by the advocacy organization Tax Justice Network (TJN) which ranks countries by financial secrecy indicators, weighted by the economic flows of each country.^[a]

It looks at how wealthy individuals and criminals can hide and launder money using the country's legal and financial systems. Automatic information interchange and beneficial ownership registration were among the ranking criteria. According to TJN, an estimated US$21 to US$32 trillion in untaxed or minimally taxed private financial wealth is held in secrecy jurisdictions (tax havens) around the world.^[1]

It is a measure of each jurisdiction's contribution to the worldwide financial secrecy that combines qualitative and quantitative data.

To create a secrecy score for each jurisdiction, qualitative data based on laws, regulations, cooperation with information exchange mechanisms, and other verified data sources is used.

The secrecy countries with the highest rankings are less transparent in the operations they host, less engaged in sharing information with other national authorities, and less compliant with international money-laundering laws. A secrecy jurisdiction is more appealing for channeling illegal money flows and hiding criminal and corrupt activities due to its lack of openness and unwillingness to engage in efficient information exchange.^[2]

After that, quantitative data is used to generate a global scale weighting for each jurisdiction based on its percentage of global offshore financial services activity. They did this by using publicly available data on each jurisdiction's international financial services trade. They employ the International Monetary Fund approach to extrapolate from stock measures to obtain flow estimates when incomplete data is required. The jurisdictions with the highest weighting are those that play the most important role in the market for non-resident financial services.^[2]

A jurisdiction with a substantial proportion of the offshore financial sector but low opacity may earn the same overall ranking as a smaller but more secretive jurisdiction. The rating takes into account not only which countries are the most secretive, but also magnitude (the amount to which a jurisdiction's secrecy is likely to have a worldwide impact).^[2]

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