 Global financial integrity was launched predicated on the notion that secrecy in the global financial system enables tax evasion, money laundering, and corruption. And that these activities foster continuing poverty in the developing world, inequality everywhere, and an undermining of democratic institutions. The framework of this opaque system, which includes tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions, anonymous trusts, falsified trade transactions, and more, facilitates the movement, hiding, and laundering of trillions of dollars. What can't be found can't be taxed. What cannot be seen cannot be prosecuted. The secrecy that has become such an inherent part of capitalism now threatens our financial system, our national security, and democracy itself. Money hides, democracy dies, and the goal of GFI and the DC Forum is to bring this threat into the light. To make apparent that opacity serves only those trying to gain the system, and that transparency and accountability is the underpinning of democracy. Capitalism and democracy are the two basic pillars of our economic and political system. They should be operating in sync to spread economic abundance and political engagement. Instead, they are becoming decoupled, no longer operating in sync. The capitalist side of the equation is running out of control, eroding the social contract, facilitating crime and corruption, evading obligations, enabling kleptocracy, maximizing income and wealth inequalities, and thus jeopardizing democracy. To address this disjuncture, I have written a book entitled Invisible Trillions, How Financial Secrecy is Imperiling Capitalism and Democracy, and The Way to Renew Our Broken System. It's due out early next year. We are initiating the DC Forum, together with other think tanks and other institutions and journalists, to address this issue of the decoupling between democracy and capitalism, and how to reignite the synergies between these two pillars of fundamental importance to our collective futures. For the past 14 years, the press and the public interest community have revealed an amazing array of offshore misbehavior. The Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, the Pandora Papers, before that the huge UBS case, HSBC case, LUX leaks, the Lawanda Papers and others. All of these scandals and reporting reveal a huge volume of criminal activity enabled by a global interlocking system of financial secrecy jurisdictions and legal structures designed to hide the ownership and movement of assets. For the banks, the prosecutions have resulted in parking ticket fines and a promise to sin no more, and for individuals, tax judgments that are frequently uncollectible. In corruption cases, asset recovery has been infrequently successful and most often inadequate. Our purpose is to look at the impact of the overall problem of financial secrecy, identify its impact on the global economy, and focus on possible effective solutions. One of the problems in tackling the financial secrecy system is that many of us take it for granted, as though it is immutable. It is not. Just as we created it, we can de-create it. The PC Forum aims to motivate reform by holding a series of events, workshops, working with journalists and policy experts who help shape public opinion, and with experts in government here and abroad. We hope to nudge people beyond awareness of the problems described in the Panama Papers and other exposés to awareness that the enabling system behind these problems is not immutable and can be reformed. At a time when democracy has been eroded at home and is under attack from powerful autocratic regimes abroad, we must confront, as soon as possible, the extent to which financial secrecy is contributing to our current political decay. Countering financial secrecy needs to become a common cause among those who want to preserve our democracy and freedom. We hope you will find this notion of interest and participate in this endeavor.