I’m at the start of a pretty frantic round trip to Washington to meet the IMF with the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development .

The discussion will be highly focussed on what additional statistical data is needed to monitor the world’s illicit financial flows.

I do, of course, want the data that country-by-country reporting could provide on world trade flows and transfer pricing abuse.

But there’s another issue of importance too. A lot of work is going on seeking to track flows out of tax havens / secrecy jurisdictions to make sure they are properly taxed. There is another side to this coin though. We need to know where they come from too. And we don’t, which is why, as the IMF has now noticed, there are potentially $18 trillion dollars in small island states alone that they cannot account for.

One hopes that at long last they’re now open to dialogue on this issue.