Global Financial Integrity

Global Financial Integrity

Abbreviation	GFI
Formation	2006
Leader	Raymond W. Baker
Managing Director	Tom Cardamone
Chairman of the Board	Lord Daniel Brennan
Revenue (2015)	$1,737,202
Expenses (2015)	$1,447,001
Website	www.gfintegrity.org

Global Financial Integrity (GFI) is a non-profit, research, advisory, and advocacy organization located in Washington, D.C.. GFI produces research on the scale, impact, and attributes of illicit financial flows—the proceeds of crime, corruption, and tax evasion—with a particular focus on developing and emerging economies. Staffed with a team of economists, lawyers, and policy analysts, the organization also advises developing country governments on policy solutions to curtail those flows, and promotes transparency measures in the international financial system as a means to global development and security.

Global Financial Integrity was launched in September 2006 following the publication of Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, (John Wiley & Sons 2005), written by Raymond W. Baker, who is now the President of GFI. Initially launched as a program of the Center for International Policy, GFI spun off as an independent organization in May 2013.

GFI is guided by a board of directors consisting of Lord Daniel Brennan (Chair), a member of the British House of Lords; Dr. Rafael Espada (Vice Chair), the former vice president of Guatemala; Dr. Lester Myers (Secretary/Treasurer), the president of the Center of Concern; Dr. Thomas Pogge, a professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University; and Mr. Baker, GFI's president.

Global Financial Integrity's areas of research apply primarily to stemming illicit financial flows, an illegal form of capital flight. GFI argues that illicit financial flows make poverty endemic; for every $1 poor nations receive in foreign aid, $10 in dirty money is taken abroad illicitly. The lack of controls on illicit outflows enable drug cartels, terrorist organizations and tax evaders to secretly move money around the world. The billions of dollars taken out of the third world embeds poverty, strips developing nations of critical resources, and contributes to failed states.

One notable area of focus is trade mispricing, the practice of shifting profits overseas by over or under invoicing intracompany transactions. Extractive Industries tend to be the focus of this initiative, as their international presence makes it easy to conduct trade mispricing to shift profits into low-tax jurisdictions. A major initiative of GFI was pushing for the Energy Security Through Transparency amendment to the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill. The amendment mandated that extractive industries report on the profits earned and taxes paid in every country in which they operate, increasing transparency and making transfer pricing abuse more difficult.