Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak.
My name is Markus Meinzer, director of policy at the Tax Justice Network, a civil society organization working globally to advance financial transparency and tax justice. My work focuses on countering illicit financial flows, including tax abuse and money laundering, through evidence-based policy research and risk assessment.
I want to make three points in my remarks.
The first point is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition or list of tax havens. Labels often reflect geopolitical bias determined by powerful actors rather than objective analysis.
Contrary to the stereotype of tropical islands as the primary offenders, our research shows that many developed economies, including OECD members, are central to enabling offshore abuse. We distinguish between corporate tax havens, which enable multinational profit shifting, and secrecy jurisdictions, which provide opacity for individuals. These categories frequently overlap in practice, but they help illustrate different channels of harm.
Our financial secrecy index combines the secrecy score, measuring the strength of transparency rules, with a global scale weight that reflects each jurisdiction's market share in offshore financial services. On this index, the United States ranks first, supplying more financial secrecy than any other country. Likewise, on our corporate tax haven index, many OECD member states—not only small island jurisdictions—rank among the world's biggest enablers of corporate profit shifting.
Canada is directly affected. Our most recent report, “State of Tax Justice 2025”, estimates $27 billion U.S. in revenue losses for Canada from multinational tax abuse between 2016 and 2021, with $13 billion U.S. attributable directly to U.S.-parented multinationals. Almost half of the harm is caused by U.S. multinationals.