The announcement by the Obama administration that it is to clamp down on US companies and individuals dodging tax would seem at first glance to herald the dawn of a new capitalist age. Naked greed is out. From henceforth, mammon must walk hand in hand with morality.
Yet anyone believing that the measures proposed by the US will deliver benefits for all those who suffer at the hands of tax dodgers may yet be disappointed.
For all that has so far been announced could quite easily be construed as nothing more than protectionist intervention aimed at safeguarding jobs and paying for the massive bank bailouts and stimulus packages with which the US has confronted the economic meltdown.
In addition to ramping up resources for the Internal Revenue Service, Barack Obama is to clamp down on loopholes that have allowed US multinationals to pay an effective tax rate as low as 2.3%. The intention is to raise an additional $210bn over the next decade.
All well and good, but if the US does not seek to engage other jurisdictions in a truly global agreement to clamp down on tax dodging, these measures will have little impact where the activities of the tax dodgers cause the greatest suffering – the world's poorest countries.
The financial crisis is already cutting a swath through their economies – Unesco recently estimated that 390 million Africans will see their income drop by about 20%, far more than in the developed world.
That is on top of the burden developing countries already carry, year in and year out – the massive $160bn a year stolen from their exchequers by the tax-dodging antics of businesses trading internationally, particularly multinationals.
The amount is more than developing countries receive in aid each year, with the revenues urgently needed to provide basic services such as health and education and the kind of infrastructure that will enable them to attract investment.
Developing countries urgently need access to information on the profits made and the taxes paid by companies trading internationally in order to spot where figures are being manipulated to lower tax liabilities at their expense.
They lack the muscle, however, to threaten the kind of sanctions that the US has indicated it might use against jurisdictions that refuse to comply with Obama's new tax requirements.
The Guardian's Tax Gap series has highlighted the injustice of companies making huge profits yet using complex accounting arrangements to avoid tax. The root of these problems is financial secrecy in some jurisdictions (usually tax havens), which allows companies to hide profits offshore and shift capital from where real economic activity is occurring to where the tax rates are low.
An international accounting standard that requires companies operating internationally to disclose where they operate, the profits they make and the taxes they pay would enable all countries, rich and poor, to identify where the tax dodgers are at work.
The clampdown announced by Obama is an implicit recognition that the measures taken by the G20, heralded by Gordon Brown as "the beginning of the end of tax havens", will in their present form fall short of the mark.
This is because the bilateral Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) proposed by the G20 enshrine "on request" information exchange. In other words, any authority requesting information has to know what it is looking for before it can submit a request.
In addition, under the TIEAs the low-tax jurisdiction is entitled to demand a great deal of proof before making information available – so much so that the US was able to successfully pursue only four information requests with Jersey over the course of a year.
If the best resourced revenue authority in the world was unable to make the system work, what hope for a developing country able to deploy far less in the way of expertise and resources?
TIEAs generally speaking are out of their reach anyway, not least because they lack the clout to force low-tax jurisdictions to be party to such agreements in the first place.
If Obama is to draw a real line under the lack of regulation and lack of transparency that triggered the present crisis, he must champion a truly multilateral agreement on automatic exchange of tax information. That way he can be a friend to the poor as well as protecting America's interests.