About the Index

Financial secrecy refers to the use of complex financial mechanisms by wealthy individuals, multinational corporations and criminals to hide their assets for the purpose of abusing tax or evading the rule of law. Financial secrecy keeps tax abuse feasible, drug cartels bankable and human trafficking profitable.

The Financial Secrecy Index is the first ever comprehensive global effort to identify all the different mechanisms of financial secrecy, and weigh them in importance.

All jurisdictions enable some degree of financial secrecy, whether knowingly or not. Unlike “tax haven blacklists” that use a binary approach to evaluating whether a jurisdiction is or is not harmful, the Financial Secrecy Index evaluates where on the secrecy spectrum jurisdictions fall. This means that all jurisdictions have a responsibility to reduce their contribution to financial secrecy, big or small.

The data from the Financial Secrecy Index is freely available for non-commercial use. However, commercial users are required to pay a commercial licensing fee. Generally, students, academics, journalists, NGOs, governmental institutions and intergovernmental organisations fall under non-commercial use. Please check our licensing page to check whether you qualify for a non-commercial or commercial license. All of the data from the Financial Secrecy Index can be downloaded from the Tax Justice Network’s Data Portal.

One of the things that makes the Financial Secrecy Index different from tax haven blacklists is that while blacklists only evaluate countries’ laws, the index evaluates both laws and the volume of financial services provided by jurisdictions to other countries’ residents.

Evaluating both these factors accurately captures how laws and financial activity intersect in the real world to create the biggest global financial secrecy risks.

We measure the financial services provided to other countries’ residents by looking at the volume of exports of financial services, as reported by the IMF’s Balance of Payments Statistics. This volume, however, can tremendously vary from country to country. The range in volume is so large, it is necessary to use a scale weighting to make the measurement of volume compatible across countries.

Importantly, however, while the Financial Secrecy Index considers both laws and volume of financial services when evaluating countries, it gives much more importance to laws in its evaluation. This means that ultimately it is the changes that countries make to their laws that primarily result in changes to their rankings. As such, a country with robust laws that prevent financial secrecy will rank at the bottom of the index no matter how much in financial services it provides to other countries’ residents.

Many jurisdictions listed on the Financial Secrecy Index are commonly described as tax havens, and tax havens are often perceived to be small palm-fringed islands filled with sleazy law firms, motor yachts and numerous shell companies. Sunny places for shady people.

The Financial Secrecy Index reveals a much richer and more complex political story. The world’s biggest players in the supply of financial secrecy are mostly not the tiny, isolated islands of the popular imagination. Instead, they are some of the richest nations.

We regularly update the Financial Secrecy Index’s methodology to address the evolving nature of global financial secrecy practices, similar to how a firewall is regularly updated to protect against newly exposed vulnerabilities. This can sometimes mean that a law a country has in place may score worse than it previously did on the index if that law has become less effective at curbing financial secrecy due to the discovery or development of secrecy practices that get around it, or due to the law falling behind the improved standards other countries are applying.

Countries are ranked on how big of a role they play in helping individuals hide their finances from the rule of a law. If a country moves up the ranking, that means its now playing a bigger role when compared to other countries. If a country moves down, its now playing a smaller role when compared to others.

Sometimes, a country moves up or down the ranking because of changes in its laws and regulations, or changes to the amount of financial services it provides to other countries’ residents. Other times, a country moves up or down the ranking not because of any changes it made, but because of changes made by other countries on the ranking. For example, if country A ranks above country B but then adopts transparency reforms that drop it down the ranking to sit below country B, country B will have moved up the ranking as a result of changes made not by itself but by country A.

This interplay on the rankings makes it possible to compare and contrast countries. And it emphasises the point that all countries need to actively work on fighting financial secrecy. A country with decent transparency laws could become the weakest link in the chain over time if it falls behind the best practices that other countries adopt.

Digging a little deeper, what exactly are the kinds of changes that countries make that move them on the ranking? To measure how big of a role each country plays, the Financial Secrecy Index combines a country’s Secrecy Score – how much room for financial secrecy a country’s laws and regulations provide – and its Global Scale Weight – how much in financial services a country provides to other countries’ residents.

These two factors mean there are two types of changes that make an impact on the ranking: 1) changes in laws and regulations that either expand or shrink the room for financial secrecy and 2) increases or decreases in the amount of financial services a country provides to other countries’ residents.

Changes in the room for financial secrecy can be either a good thing (less room) or bad thing (more room). Changes in the amount of financial services, however, is neither a good thing nor bad thing. If a country has little to no room for financial secrecy in its laws and regulations and increases the amount of financial services it offers, there’s little to worry about because that additional amount of activity will find few avenues to escape the rule of law. On the other hand, if a country has a lot of room for financial secrecy and increases the amount of financial services it offers, there will be a lot more financial activity finding avenues to escape the rule of law.

Financial secrecy is a key facilitator of corruption. Without financial secrecy, many corrupt deals simply would not be able to happen.  

In the field of international governance and transparency, one of the most well-known rankings of corruption is Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks poor countries in Africa and elsewhere – predominantly the victims of an estimated US$1 trillion-odd in annual illicit financial outflows – as the ‘most corrupt’. But all these outflows must be received somewhere. So the Financial Secrecy Index examines the enablers: those jurisdictions that encourage and facilitate illicit financial flows, by providing an environment of secrecy that allows these outflows to remain hidden, and largely untaxed.

As a comparison of the two indices shows below, the Corruption Perceptions Index ranks jurisdictions by perceptions (see here for a critique of this methodology that focuses mainly on so-called experts and local elite views) where local corruption is the worst. In this way, as Alex Cobham wrote in Foreign Policy, the Corruption Perceptions Index “embeds a powerful and misleading elite bias in popular perceptions of corruption, potentially contributing to a vicious cycle and at the same time incentivizing inappropriate policy responses”.

In contrast, the Financial Secrecy Index uses objective measures (not perceptions) to examine which countries are the worst offenders in enabling corruption and illicit financial flows from other countries. What you see is that many countries perceived to be the least corrupt by their citizens are actually among the worst offenders in enabling corruption and illicit financial flows in other countries.

As long as tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions keep offering banking secrecy and the ability to hide other assets (real estate, gold, art), or the identities of criminals behind secretive companies, trusts, partnerships or foundations, it will be impossible – both for poor countries and for rich ones – to stop the suffering resulting from corruption, tax evasion, money laundering and other financial crimes.

As Transparency International itself acknowledges, “However, integrity at home does not always translate into integrity abroad, and multiple scandals in 2019 demonstrated that transnational corruption is often facilitated, enabled and perpetuated by seemingly clean Nordic countries”.

Businesses looking to invest overseas may find it useful to know that the Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Libya, say, as among the world’s most corrupt nations from the perspective of officials demanding bribes. But this is of little help to ordinary Libyans, who want to know more: where their country’s wealth has gone, how it left, and who helped it leave. This is where the Financial Secrecy Index comes in. We consider the former Libyan leadership to represent the demand side of corruption, while Zurich, London, and other secrecy jurisdictions that received illicit Libyan loot to be the suppliers of corruption services: the supply side.

The same challenge faces Angolans. The Luanda Leaks uncovered how former Angolan president’s daughter Isabel dos Santos bought state assets and made use of more than 400 companies, subsidiaries and accounts in 94 secrecy jurisdictions. This business empire benefited to the tune of many billions of dollars in consulting jobs, loans, public works contracts and licenses from the Angolan government. The Financial Secrecy Index ranking reveals what the Corruption Perceptions Index conceals. It exposes the hypocrisy that lies behind some of the finger-pointing at “highly corrupt” developing countries, and provides a basis for a new wave of understandings about corruption in a global context.

To calculate Secrecy Scores, countries laws and regulations are evaluated against 20 indicators, which altogether consist of over 100 questions. The results from all 20 indicators are used to determine the Secrecy Score, which in turn determines countries’ rankings.

Countries are ranked on a combination of their Secrecy Score – how much room for financial secrecy a country’s laws and regulations provide – and their Global Scale Weight – how much in financial services a jurisdiction provides to other countries’ residents.

One-third of the global tax abuse that takes place every year is generally committed by wealthy individuals hiding their finances offshore. The rest is done by multinational corporations moving their profits offshore.

The Tax Justice Network runs two indexes to monitor these two sides of global tax abuse. The Financial Secrecy Index identifies the countries most responsible for helping individuals hide their finances and assets offshore. The Corporate Tax Haven Index identifies the countries most responsible for helping multinational corporations shift their profits offshore.

All countries enable financial secrecy to a different degree, so all countries have a responsibility to strengthen their laws against it. We include countries that are well-known secrecy jurisdictions and financial centres, but have expanded the number of countries covered in the past beyond just the biggest enablers. Our index includes now all EU countries and some African and South American countries, as requested by our grant funders, so that more countries and regions can benefit from the index.

Prior to 2025, the Financial Secrecy Index was updated once every two years. All the indicators were updated together at the same time as part of each biennial update to the index.

From 2025, we started regularly updating the Financial Secrecy Index on a rolling basis. We do this by updating several indicators at a time, every few months, making our way through all the indicators in batches over the course of our update cycle. Secrecy Scores, and as a result rankings, are revised every time we update indicator data. We update countries’ Global Scale Weights once a year.

The new rolling basis allows us to capture regulatory changes more closely to when they occur and to offer a more dynamic view of countries’ roles in global financial secrecy.

Please do! Maintaining a global database on countries’ evolving regulations is no easy task, especially for a small team of researchers like ours. Your feedback helps us keep our data on countries’ regulations up to date and spot anything we may have missed. You can report any corrections you believe should be made by clicking on the “Feedback” button when browsing the website, or by directly accessing the feedback form here.

Countries can use the Financial Secrecy Index like a troubleshooting tool to identify which of their laws and regulations create the most room for wealthy individuals to hide their finances from the rule of law.

This can be done by visiting a country’s profile page and exploring how it scores on each of the indicators its laws are evaluated against. The indicators on which it scores the worst, and on which it scores below the global average score, are good places to find low hanging fruit and quick fixes to act on.

We share our evaluations with all countries included in the Financial Secrecy Index, giving every country opportunities to check our assessments and query any discrepancies. If a country provides sufficient evidence to alter an evaluation we made, we update the evaluation to reflect the evidence. We encourage countries to notify us when they make changes to laws and regulations monitored by the index to help us integrate those changes by the next update of the index.