The Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to the opacity of their financial services industry and the scale of their offshore financial activities. The index is based on 20 indicators grouped around four broad dimensions of secrecy:
ownership registration; legal entity transparency; integrity of tax and financial regulation; and international standards and cooperation. The index is designed to help policymakers, researchers and advocates understand the extent and impact of global financial secrecy, tax havens/secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows. The index uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to create a measure of each jurisdiction’s contribution to the global problem of financial secrecy. Qualitative data is based on laws, regulations, cooperation with information exchange processes and other verifiable data sources. These are used to prepare a secrecy score for each jurisdiction. Quantitative data is then used to create a global scale weighting for each jurisdiction based on its share of offshore financial services activity in the global total.
