As bills come to a vote, it is not uncommon for amendments to be added.  Sometimes the proposed changes seem to completely unrelated to the bill. Often a single sentence can impact the public dramatically.  We cobble together an analysis and fire it over to our administration, who then lobby the legislature for or against the proposed language in the bill.

Bill tracking software is a niche business. To me, it seems symbolic that proprietary software allows private sector business groups to monitor and influence public sector legislation.

However, there open source apps available to ordinary citizens for tracking legislation.  Even better, there are communities working together to make the legislative process more transparent.

One such community is the Sunlight Foundation.  In addition to developers, the Sunlight Foundation offers non-tech opportunities to shine a light on bills, influence, and elections.

Extracted from http://sunlightfoundation.com/about/

OUR MISSION

The Sunlight Foundation is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses the tools of civic tech, open data, policy analysis and journalism to make our government and politics more accountable and transparent to all. Our vision is to use technology to enable more complete, equitable and effective democratic participation. Our overarching goal is to achieve changes in the law to require real-time, online transparency for all government information, with a special focus on the political money flow and who tries to influence government and how government responds. And, while our work began in 2006 with only a focus on the U.S. Congress, our open government work now takes place at the local, state, federal and international levels.

We believe that information is power, or, to put it more finely, disproportionate access to information is power. We are committed to improving access to government information by making it available online, indeed redefining “public” information as meaning “online.”

We approach our work in a number of ways. We work with thousands of software developers, local transparency activists, bloggers, on and off-line active citizens and journalists, involving them in distributed research projects, hackathons and training. Sunlight’s Policy team pushes for improved transparency policy through NGO efforts like OpeningParliament.org, and by working directly with governments at all levels. Our reporters cover political influence stories both through reporting and through close collaboration with technical staff, leveraging computer-assisted reporting and data visualization techniques. And in Sunlight Labs, our team of technologists and designers create apps and websites to bring information directly to citizens, as well as building and maintaining APIs—Application Programming Interfaces—that power the applications and work of others.

Extracted from http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/community/

Welcome to the Sunlight Developer Community! On this page you’ll find a sampling of projects to get you started on contributing to an OpenGov project. There are three categories for projects:

• Needs tech help, for projects that need a software developer’s touch
• Needs non-tech help, for projects that rely on a community of volunteers to help analyze government data
• Projects to inspire, for projects that aren’t actively seeking contributions, but are open source projects, ready to be deployed in your home jurisdiction.
  

  Foreign Influence Project

  Sunlight Foundation Help track how foreign governments and entities try to influence U.S. policy by helping us comb through amazingly detailed records on file at the Department of Justice. These records provide the most detailed information available on how Washington’s influence industry work. Help us to turn it into a searchable, sortable database that developers, journalists and citizens can use.

  Needs Non-Tech Help

  United States Glossary

  Sunlight Foundation A collection of pleasant, readable definitions of terms and processes in the United States. Designed for integration in various user-facing applications. Ease of understanding is the #1 priority. Precision and completeness are #2.

  Needs Non-Tech Help

• Bill Nicknames

  Sunlight Foundation Bill Nicknames is a github repository that contains a CSV with popular bill numbers matched with their (unofficial) nicknames. For instance, HR3590 is mapped to ‘obamacare’ and ‘ppaca’, and HR3101 is mapped to ‘hipaa’. This project always needs help adding new bills that are commonly referred to by their nickname instead of by their official bill title.

  Needs Non-Tech Help

Photo by jacopast

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Buried beneath the sensational revelations making headlines in the wake of the Panama Papers is a simple truth about the importance of fair and effective tax systems: revenues from taxation – whether from company profits, capital gains or wages – are crucial for maintaining nationwide mechanisms of economic sharing that safeguard the basic needs of citizens. Not only does the redistribution of tax revenue allow governments to fund safety nets and public services designed to keep poverty at bay, it maintains the infrastructure needed to facilitate a wide variety of social and economic activities, from public transport and roads, to schools and hospitals.

The unprecedented leak of files from the offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca reveal that although people and companies can use tax havens for legitimate purposes, too often such mechanisms are abused by those seeking to avoid paying their fair share of tax, potentially depriving the governments of hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues. Unsurprisingly, the call for all businesses and individuals to ‘pay their fair share’ is increasingly popular among tax justice campaigners in the Global North, where governments lose billions each year from tax dodging – even as they reduce public spending on essential services in order to ‘balance the books’. The rationale for ending tax haven abuse is incontrovertible: recouping the huge sums involved could enable governments to reverse programs of economic austerity, reduce inequality or even help fund innovative public investment programs such as a green new deal.

Globally, economists estimate that $7.6tn worth of assets are held off shore and are thereby avoiding taxation – 25% more than five years ago and equivalent to 8% of the world’s total financial assets. Citizens for Tax Justice have calculated that Fortune 500 companies alone hold a record $2.4tn in offshore accounts, which they argue allows them to avoid almost $700bn in US federal income taxes. Most recently, Oxfam have estimated that the 50 largest US companies have $1.4 trillion hidden in Tax havens, which costs the US government approximately $111 each year. In the EU, governments are reportedly losing out on revenues of between 50-70bn euros ($56-79bn).

Undermining social solidarity and economic development

In a global economy, tax avoidance of this magnitude not only weakens social solidarity and redistributive mechanisms within countries, it severely hampers efforts to reduce global poverty and strengthen international systems of sharing. The research organisation Global Financial Integrity estimates that developing countries lose around $1tn a year in illicit capital flows, much of which is facilitated by tax havens. According to UNCTAD, developing countries lose $100bn a year in revenues from corporate tax avoidance alone – which is a far higher proportion of their GDP compared to rich countries, and only $30bn less than what they collectively receive in oversees aid. Calculations by Oxfam help put this figure into perspective:

“$100 billion is four times what the 47 least developed countries in the world spend on education for their 932 million citizens. [It] is equivalent to what it would cost to provide basic life-saving health services or safe water and sanitation to more than 2.2 billion people.”

Improving international cooperation on tax matters and stemming the perverse flow of capital from the Global South to North would mean that developing countries could potentially channel significant amounts of additional funding into the provision of social safety nets and basic welfare. It would also empower them to end their dependency on oversees aid and finance poverty reduction from their own resources.

Despite the recent Panama revelations, the call for a more transparent, just and effective global tax framework has long been advocated by civil society organisations and a majority of developing countries. Most recently, the proposal was widely discussed during the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) negotiations, when the G77, China and a broad swathe of civil society groups called for an intergovernmental tax body with universal membership to be established under the auspices the United Nations.

However, even though donor countries pushed for governments in the Global South to take greater responsibility for mobilising development finance domestically, they once again neglected to enact the concrete measures needed to prevent illicit financial flows and tackle tax avoidance. This failure to empower developing countries to improve domestic revenues was widely decried as a major disappointment during the Financing for Development negotiations in July 2015, especially as it was unclear how governments would be able to meet the ‘Global Goals’ without mobilising huge amounts of additional finance.

In the absence of a more effective and inclusive global tax agreement, decisions on international tax rules continue to be undertaken undemocratically by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Unfortunately, most developing countries have been excluded from the key decisions that have been made on global tax standards thus far, even though they are expected to abide by them. A complex web of thousands of unscrutinised and outdated tax treaties also exist between countries, many of which create additional opportunities for multinational tax avoidance. As Action Aid outline in their recent report ‘Mistreated’, these treaties invariably favour higher income nations and impose an unfair burden on lower-income countries, thereby widening global inequalities. To quote just one of many examples from their research:

“Bangladesh is losing approximately US$85 million every year from just one clause in its tax treaties that severely restricts its right to tax dividends. With an annual total health expenditure of approximately US$25 per capita, remedying this alone could pay for health services for 3.4 million people.”

Towards international tax cooperation at the UN

The Panama Papers demonstrate that the world’s fragmented tax systems are not only ineffective and open to abuse, but they can directly undermine systems of economic sharing and the provision of essential public goods and services. They also make a convincing case for establishing a more inclusive and just global tax architecture that can prevent the worst tax avoidance practices and bolster government revenues – particular in developing countries. Unsurprisingly, calls for governments in rich countries to reconsider the proposal for a global tax body that were originally put forward during the SDG negotiations are once again on the rise.

According to the European Network on Debt and Development, the overall purpose of a UN tax body is to ensure that the international tax system is transparent, coherent and supports equality and development. In the longer term, one of the key tasks of the intergovernmental body should be to establish a legally binding and comprehensive UN Tax Convention that could level the playing field and replace the many thousands of complex treaty systems that currently exist. Central to the entire proposal, therefore, is the need to scale up international cooperation and ensure that all nations are involved in both the decision making and implementation process. Needless to say, the UN is the only forum in which such an inclusive and democratic process could be deliberated, since it has universal membership and provides a voice for all nations.

Even though there remains a robust demand from civil society groups and countries in the Global South for a UN-coordinated tax framework, OECD countries have shown little sign that they are willing to consider such a proposal. In response to the Panama leaks, the European Commission have instead proposed public tax transparency rules for multinationals on a country-by-country basis. But the proposals are weak and ineffectual as they are limited to the EU, do not apply to the vast majority of multinational companies, and only pertain to a small and selective list of tax havens. Similarly, the recent ‘hammer blow’ by European nations designed to expose shell firms and oversees trusts is regarded by campaign groups as lacking ambition and unlikely to ensure that beneficial ownership information is ever made public.

A number of international conferences in the coming weeks present governments with additional opportunities to rethink global tax cooperation and finally work towards an inclusive international solution. These include the latest Financing for Development meeting in New York, an anti-corruption conference in the UK and a World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul. However, given the long history of government inaction on this critical issue and the influence of vested interests that benefit most from the secrecy that tax havens provide, it is unlikely that the needed reforms will be forthcoming anytime soon. As movements such as Nuit Dabout in France and Democracy Spring in the US demonstrate, an escalation in peaceful public protest therefore presents an important opportunity for concerned citizens to demand tax justice and a fairer distribution of wealth within countries and internationally.

Image credit: Eric Hill – Flickr Creative Commons

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