Google, Money Laundering and the Shell Game

Source: News
Complete item: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25375352-5015795,00.html

GLOBAL banking and tax laws are a joke, says an Australian university researcher who used Google and $10,000 to establish a series of shell corporations which could easily have been used by criminal organizations to launder money.

Professor Jason Sharman, from Queensland's Griffith Business School, set up shell corporations and bank accounts without any identification.  A shell company serves as a means for conveyance for business transactions without necessarily having assets.

He found it was banks in the US and UK which were flouting the rules, not the smaller island tax havens.  In one case, he said, a US provider in Wyoming offered to use their own employees' social security numbers as the tax identification number for a corporation.

Prof Sharman set out to see how difficult it was to violate recent global standards stopping anonymous participation in the international financial system.  He emailed 45 corporate service providers across 22 countries soliciting offers to set up anonymous shell corporations - and 17 agreed. 

Of these, 13 were from OECD countries, including seven in the United Kingdom, four in the United States, one in Spain, and one in Canada, and the remaining four from some of the 28 better known tax havens.

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