While many of us were focused on the Boston bombings, Venezue-la’s dubious elections and North Korea’s war noises in recent weeks, the world’s biggest nations took a potentially historic step — they launched a system to detect secret offshore bank accounts.
At an April 19 meeting in Washington DC, the G-20 group of nations, the club of the world’s largest economies, announced an agreement to start an “automatic exchange’’ of information on bank accounts of people who may be evading taxes or trying to hide dirty money abroad.
At the same time, the G-20 agreed to put new pressure on tax havens to lift their