By Samantha Sterling Parker, Long FT Weekend

Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026

Book Review: Revealing Wealth: Combatting Tax Evasion with Data, Political Will and Technology by Martyn Jones

In an age defined by algorithms, trillion-dollar tech companies, and data flowing across borders at the speed of light, one of the oldest problems in civilisation persists: how the wealthy avoid paying their share of tax. In Revealing Wealth, Martyn Jones argues that the real scandal is not simply that tax evasion exists, but that in a data-rich world we still allow it to thrive.

This is not a conventional economics book. Nor is it merely a political polemic. Instead, Jones delivers something rarer: a technically grounded blueprint for dismantling the opaque architecture of global tax evasion using the same tools that power modern digital economies.

The book opens with a blunt premise. Tax evasion is not just a fiscal inconvenience; it is a structural threat to democratic societies. When governments lose hundreds of billions in revenue each year, the consequences ripple outward: underfunded healthcare systems, deteriorating infrastructure, widening inequality, and a corrosive sense that the rules are different for the powerful.

Jones’s central claim is deceptively simple: the global financial system already contains the data required to expose hidden wealth. What’s missing is the political will, and the technological architecture, to connect it.

That architecture sits at the heart of Revealing Wealth. The author proposes an ambitious concept: a World Asset Register, a globally integrated system that aggregates data from land registries, financial institutions, securities depositories, tax authorities, and other repositories of economic ownership. With modern analytics, artificial intelligence, and large-scale data integration, such a system could map global wealth in ways previously unimaginable.

For readers familiar with debates about financial transparency, the idea will echo proposals from leading economists. But Jones brings something distinctive to the table: a deep practitioner’s understanding of data systems. His background in information architecture and analytics gives the book a technical credibility rarely seen in discussions about tax justice.

Where many commentators stop at moral outrage, Jones drills into the plumbing of global finance. He explains how shell companies obscure ownership, how profit-shifting works, how data can be integrated across jurisdictions, and how AI-driven analytics could identify suspicious patterns in financial flows.

This makes the book particularly compelling for a technology-literate audience. 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?

The answer, according to Jones, lies in fragmentation. Financial information exists across thousands of disconnected systems: national registries, banks, tax agencies, legal databases, and corporate filings. Each contains a fragment of the truth. The challenge is stitching those fragments together.

His proposed solution resembles the modern data architectures powering today’s digital enterprises: data meshes, integrated analytics layers, machine-learning models, and searchable knowledge systems built on large language models and retrieval frameworks. In other words, the same technological foundations that run modern corporations could also expose hidden wealth.

This is where Revealing Wealth feels strikingly contemporary. Jones positions tax enforcement not as an administrative function but as a global data platform challenge. The book reads, at times, like a strategic roadmap for governments attempting to catch up with the technological sophistication of multinational finance.

Yet the narrative is not purely technical. Jones repeatedly returns to the ethical stakes. Hidden wealth is not an abstract accounting anomaly; it shapes real lives. When capital escapes taxation, the burden shifts downward to workers and small businesses. The result is a slow erosion of the social contract.

Importantly, Jones avoids simplistic villains. Tax havens, he notes, are not purely rogue actors; they are embedded in the structure of global finance. Some operate legally within existing frameworks. The deeper issue is the system itself, an international tax architecture designed for a twentieth-century economy that now struggles to govern digital, borderless capital.

The book also offers a historical sweep of tax evasion, tracing its evolution from ancient empires to modern offshore finance. These sections underline an uncomfortable truth: the cat-and-mouse game between tax authorities and wealth holders is as old as taxation itself. What has changed is scale. Today’s financial secrecy networks can hide trillions.

Where Jones departs from pessimism is in his belief that the tools to solve the problem already exist. Big data analytics, blockchain-enabled registries, cross-border reporting systems, and automated information exchange frameworks are beginning to expose financial opacity. The missing ingredient is coordination.

The proposed World Asset Register would represent that coordination, a shared infrastructure enabling governments, regulators, journalists, and civil society to see who owns what, where, and through which intermediaries.

Critics may question whether such a system is politically realistic. Building a global registry of wealth would require unprecedented cooperation among nations, many of which benefit from financial secrecy. Jones acknowledges these obstacles but frames them as challenges of governance rather than technical impossibilities.

That framing is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Revealing Wealth refuses to treat tax evasion as an inevitable feature of capitalism. Instead, it treats it as an engineering problem waiting to be solved.

The writing style occasionally veers into passionate advocacy, but the core argument remains grounded in evidence and technical detail. For readers in finance, technology, or public policy, the book offers something rare: a bridge between the worlds of economic justice and data architecture.

Ultimately, Revealing Wealth asks a provocative question: if we can map the genome, simulate climate systems, and build global digital networks, why do we still tolerate invisible fortunes moving through opaque financial channels?

Jones’s answer is both hopeful and unsettling. The technology to reveal hidden wealth already exists. What remains uncertain is whether the political courage to deploy it will follow.

For policymakers, technologists, and anyone concerned with the future of economic fairness, Revealing Wealth is not just a book. It is a challenge, and possibly a blueprint for the next phase of financial transparency.