End of year gift to readers: OECD FATF country ratings as an excel file

The OECD recently published a report on Illicit Financial Flows which has received remarkably limited media coverage so far considering its contents. Among the report’s findings are that:

– Zero percent of OECD countries are compliant with OECD Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations which aim to reduce the risk of corrupt public officials using the financial system for laundering of corruption proceeds, specifically recommendations 5 and 6 on customer due diligence and politically exposed persons.

– Only 9% of OECD countries are compliant with recommendations on beneficial ownership of corporate entities (legal persons) while 0% are compliant with recommendations on beneficial ownership (legal arrangements). The report says these recommendations are “key in fighting money laundering”.

The Economist called the report “damning” and an “overdue mea culpa” while noting that it “could have been tougher still. Strong resistance from the OECD’s constituents and some secretariat officials repeatedly delayed its publication and diluted its content.”

This pressure to dilute the contents may explain why detailed data on country performance is in an annex to chapter 2, as also noted by Quartz. The relevant OECD page only has the report as a pdf file with no additional data files.

Table 2.A2, in particular, presents country ratings against each of the 49 FATF recommendations using a colour coding which makes it very difficult to compare across countries and sometimes even to locate specific ratings for each recommendation.

The second page of the table looks like this, for example:

Edward Tufte would not approve.

So, as an end of year/Christmas gift to Secrecy Monitor readers, here are all 1666 country level datapoints in an easy (or at least easier) to use excel file, using the same four-point scale as proposed by the OECD in its note on data on page 47 of its report. The excel file allows to quickly check individual country data for each of the 40+9 OECD recommendations:

-What are Germany’s ratings on Recommendations 33 and 34 regarding beneficial ownership? Non-compliant

-What do Switzerland, the US and the UK score on Recommendation 5 regarding Customer Due Diligence? Partially compliant.

I hope this is a useful resource, and wish readers all the best for 2014!

A note on source data: There seem to be some discrepancies between table 2.A2 and table 2.A1 in the OECD report. For example, according to table 2.A1 Australia is compliant with 10 recommendations and largely compliant with 22, while counting the recommendations individually in table 2.A2 yields 12 compliant ratings and 14 largely compliant ratings. Similar discrepancies regarding the number of compliant and largely compliant scores can be found for the next 3 countries in table 2.A2: Austria, Belgium and Canada. (To make sure this wasn’t a data entry issue on my part I checked the source data in tables 2.A1 and 2.A2 several times. The data in the second part of table 2.A1 in the original report – on non-compliant and partially compliant ratings – seems to be ok indicating that there could be a calculation error in the first part of the table.)