The U.S. Is a Hypocrite on Global Financial Crime: Editorial

For more than a decade, the U.S. has pressed the rest of the world to crack down on the financial secrecy that has aided tax evasion and international crime. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, adopted in 2010, requires other countries to report the accounts of U.S. taxpayers or be excluded from the U.S. financial system. Governments complied, despite the costs imposed on their financial institutions (and on U.S. taxpayers living abroad). Indeed, they went further: More than 100 countries signed on to the Common Reporting Standard, which exchanges more information than FATCA demands.

Yet the U.S. didn’t reciprocate ...