The Corporate Tax Tracker is an online platform, that allows anyone to compare and analyse banks’ activities and payments in different jurisdictions of operation. The visualisation of the data aims at providing more transparency into the corporate tax world by visualising the overall state of financial information in one place.
Background
Major financial leaks, such as LuxLeaks and the Panama Papers, have demonstrated how big multinational enterprises shift their profits from one jurisdiction to another to avoid taxes. In the EU, the banking sector has been required to publicly report on its key financial data on a country-by-country basis since 2015. Country-by-country reporting (CbCR) is a tax transparency tool which opens up the activities, structures and taxes multinational enterprises pay on their corporate income for each country where they operate. CbCR data can also demonstrate how banks and companies use certain jurisdictions and techniques to potentially decrease their tax bills and maximise their profits. This first edition of the Corporate Tax Tracker uses data collected by Oxfam for their report Opening the Vaults.
Diving into the financial data of European banks
The Corporate Tax Tracker platform uses the reporting data of the banks concerned to visualise financial information in an easily accessible and understandable format. Even with the limitations of the currently available CbCR data, the platform allows its users to get a more comprehensive idea on how European banks operate in different jurisdictions. It allows everyone to examine operations of individual banks and banking operations in individual jurisdictions. The platform also focuses on discrepancies of certain operations, in which corporate profits are very high in comparison with the turnover or number of the employees of a selected bank.
For more information on the Corporate Tax Tracker, read our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document
To understand how to navigate the Corporate Tax Tracker, see our introduction and tutorial video below: