finding illicit financial flowS with network science
Polarization // social networks
Inequality and crime // financial networks
who is the largest investor in spain?
who is the largest investor in brazil?
who is the largest investor in south africa?
why?
Spoiler: Tax avoidance/evasion
professionals
corporate entities
state
PARt 1: The corporations
corporate ownership is complex
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Fichtner, J., Takes, F. W., & Heemskerk, E. M. (2017). Uncovering offshore financial centers: Conduits and sinks in the global corporate ownership network. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1-10.
how do companies organize their corporate structures?
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Fichtner, J., Takes, F. W., & Heemskerk, E. M. (2017). Uncovering offshore financial centers: Conduits and sinks in the global corporate ownership network. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1-10.
Data provider: Orbis (300M+ companies, 100M+ ownership links)
sinks
15 companies per capita
Garcia-Bernardo, Fichtner, Takes, Heemskerk (2017)
conduits
Work with Valeria Secchini (PhD candidate at COPTAX, Charles University)
modeling corporate structures with higher-order dependencies
First order
Second order
PH
PL
...
Work with Valeria Secchini (PhD candidate at COPTAX, Charles University)
modeling corporate structures with higher-order dependencies
First order
Second order
PH
PL
...
Xu, Jian, Thanuka L. Wickramarathne, and Nitesh V. Chawla. "Representing higher-order dependencies in networks." Science advances 2.5 (2016): e1600028.
Q: Is PH a better representation of the data than PL?
PH
PL
Test: are the two distributions different?
Potential approach: Kullback-Leibler divergence > δ
Problem: overfitting
(high number of false positives)
On realistic synthetic data:
Precision: 7%
Sensitivity: 62%
Our solution: Cross-validation
Find pattern in train dataset, keep if it holds in validation
Results:
Applied to multinational corporations
201 patterns, 80% containing a tax haven
p.
p.
p.
PARt 2: the professionals
- Corporate structures are created by tax professionals:
- Set up the entity
- Provide directors
- Manage the accounts
- In the Netherlands: Trust Industry (trustkantoren)
- 94% of the services are provided to foreign companies
- 250,592 entities in 100 addresses
- Providing trust services requires a license
- But it is expensive + compliance
8150 companies
9.3/window
facilitators are key
How many illegal trust service providers are in the netherlands?
detect them based on their network
Garcia-Bernardo, Javier, Joost Witteman, and Marilou Vlaanderen. "Uncovering the size of the illegal corporate service provider industry in the Netherlands: a network approach." EPJ Data Science 11.1 (2022): 23.
Strategy:
- Build network features
- Find similar directors to those from a licensed trust
- Manually annotate a sample
- Robustness test
Results:
Illegal trust service providers:
- 31-51% of total number of trust service providers
- 19-27% of all companies managed
Maybe a better approach: Graph Neural Networks
Andrea Longobucco MSc
https://distill.pub/2021/gnn-intro/
PARt 3: The state
what type of country lose the most from tax avoidance?
Garcia-Bernardo, Javier, and Petr Janský. "Profit shifting of multinational corporations worldwide." arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08444 (2022).
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Haberly, D., Janský, P., Palanský, M., & Secchini, V. (2022). The indirect costs of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate cross-country inequality (No. 2022/33). WIDER Working Paper.
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Haberly, D., Janský, P., Palanský, M., & Secchini, V. (2022). The indirect costs of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate cross-country inequality (No. 2022/33). WIDER Working Paper.
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Haberly, D., Janský, P., Palanský, M., & Secchini, V. (2022). The indirect costs of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate cross-country inequality (No. 2022/33). WIDER Working Paper.
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Haberly, D., Janský, P., Palanský, M., & Secchini, V. (2022). The indirect costs of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate cross-country inequality (No. 2022/33). WIDER Working Paper.
Garcia-Bernardo, J., Haberly, D., Janský, P., Palanský, M., & Secchini, V. (2022). The indirect costs of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate cross-country inequality (No. 2022/33). WIDER Working Paper.
developing countries lose more
summary
- Wealth inequality is rising
- Tax avoidance is key
- Complex corporate structures are used for it
- Network science tools help us:
- Understand how they organize (higher order dependencies)
- Estimate which countries gain/lose
- Detect facilitators
summary
- Wealth inequality is rising
- Tax avoidance is key
- Complex corporate structures are used for it
- Network science tools help us:
- Understand how companies organize (higher order dependencies)
- Estimate which countries gain/lose
- Detect facilitators
Javier García-Bernardo
javier.gbe@pm.me
NetSci SIG
By Javier GB
NetSci SIG
Presentation for the dutch network science society
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