Beneficial Ownership Information

Domestic public finance is essential to financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), providing public goods and services, increasing equity, and helping manage macroeconomic stability. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda places domestic resource mobilization at the core of the actions that countries need to take to deliver sustainable development. Countries have been working to increase revenues so that they can invest in the SDGs, but tax avoidance, tax evasion and corruption are undermining countries’ efforts. Illicit financial flow (IFF) is the term that covers these activities (see Figure 1) that cross borders and reduce the availability of resources for financing sustainable development, including recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Addis Agenda, Member States committed to eliminate IFFs. Since 2015, they have taken many actions to boost transparency and combat IFFs, but there is more work to be done. Eliminating IFFs will require further actions across the sphere of national and global governance as well as international cooperation. Transparency about the actors in economic and financial matters is an essential component in the ability of country authorities to enforce the law, reduce corruption and ensure taxpayers pay all taxes that are due. Increasing the accuracy and transparency of beneficial ownership information is an important component of solutions for reducing tax avoidance and evasion and combatting corruption and money-laundering.