Pip: Hidden fortunes, opaque shell companies, and the quiet question of why governments with access to the most powerful data tools in history still can’t … or won’t… track where the money goes. That’s the territory Martyn Jones has been mapping.
Mara: This episode follows his work on tax evasion, financial transparency, and the case that this is fundamentally a data problem… and that the tools to solve it already exist. Let’s start with the book at the centre of it all.
Revealing Wealth: Tax Evasion as a Data Problem
Pip: The familiar story about tax evasion frames it as a moral failure… bad actors, offshore secrecy, political cowardice. The book under review here asks whether that framing is actually the obstacle, and what changes if you treat it as an engineering challenge instead.
Mara: The review sets up the central argument directly: “Jones treats tax evasion as a data problem disguised as a political one. If e-commerce platforms can track billions of transactions in real time, he asks, why can’t governments track global asset ownership?”
Pip: The upshot is that the incapacity isn’t technical… it’s structural. The data already exists across land registries, financial institutions, tax authorities, and corporate filings. What’s missing is the architecture to connect it, and the will to build that architecture.
Mara: The proposed solution is a World Asset Register… a globally integrated system pulling from those disconnected sources and applying modern analytics, including AI and large-scale data integration, to map ownership across jurisdictions. The review notes that Jones brings a practitioner’s credibility to this: his background in information architecture gives the technical proposals weight that purely political accounts of tax justice rarely carry.
Pip: And the stakes he anchors it to aren’t abstract. When governments lose hundreds of billions annually, the consequences are underfunded healthcare, deteriorating infrastructure, and… as the review puts it… “a corrosive sense that the rules are different for the powerful.” That’s not a footnote; it’s the reason the engineering problem matters.
Mara: The review also flags that Jones avoids casting tax havens as simply rogue actors. Many operate legally within existing frameworks. The deeper issue is an international tax architecture designed for a twentieth-century economy, now struggling to govern digital, borderless capital.
Pip: Which is precisely what makes the World Asset Register proposal feel contemporary rather than utopian — it’s the same data-mesh logic already running modern enterprises, applied to sovereign financial oversight.
Mara: The review acknowledges the political obstacles are real. Building a global registry requires cooperation among nations that actively benefit from financial secrecy. Jones frames those as governance challenges rather than technical impossibilities — and that distinction is, arguably, where the book’s argument lives or dies.
Pip: Whether the political courage follows the technical blueprint, that’s the open question the book leaves with you.
Mara: The technology exists. The data exists. The argument that this is solvable, rather than inevitable, is the provocation worth sitting with.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see what other corners of the system Jones has been poking at. There’s usually more plumbing to inspect.
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