The Atlas of the Offshore World launched in October 2023 with a clear purpose: to make the offshore economy more visible, measurable, and therefore harder to ignore. Since then, our priority has been to strengthen what sits underneath the Atlas — expanding data coverage, refining methods, and correcting the occasional “outlier” that, rather than being a nuisance, often signals where an approach needs improvement.
In 2025, the Atlas transited into a second phase. Alongside substantial technical upgrades — better data quality, broader scope, clearer documentation — the Atlas team deliberately shifted more effort toward dissemination and real-world uptake. That meant deeper outreach with policymakers and tax administrations in the Global South, non expert audiences and a stronger presence in multilateral arenas where evidence can shape standards and decisions. In parallel, we expanded our analysis of the institutional structures that make enforcement possible, including how information-sharing systems such as the Common Reporting Standard are implemented in practice.
2025 was a step-change year: better data, stronger methods, broader uptake. Below are some of the releases and milestones that made it happen.
Updates and replication
The dataset Global Profit Shifting by Multinational Enterprises added the year 2022 to its time series and updated its methodology
The dataset Offshore Financial Wealth added the years 2022-23 to its time series and updated its methodology
We made 1 public github repository available with aggregate CRS statistics and example code*
We made 1 publicly replicable data package OFW available on github*
*available upon request to contact@atlas-offshore-world.org
Impact in the Global South and multilateral arenas
Dissemination of the findings of the Atlas nurtured discussions and investigations carried out by the National Board of Revenue and the Anti-Corruption Commission in Bangladesh related to offshore real estate.
Atlas-affiliated research on Brazil (Palomo et al., 2025) used linked administrative tax data to show that Brazil's richest earners pay a lower effective tax rate (20.6%) than the national average (42.5%), and that top-1% income concentration (27.4%) is far higher than previously estimated.
Atlas researcher Ron Davies built and trained the Uganda Revenue Authority to use a new methodology for detecting profit-shifting firms in administrative tax data — flagging companies with persistently large, unexplained residuals — with the same approach tested at South Africa's Revenue Service.
Skatteforsk co-organized two high-level panels at the UN's 4th Financing for Development Conference (FfD4) in 2025. One at UN Headquarters in New York with UNDP's Sustainable Finance Hub, gathering officials from Brazil, Spain and Kenya alongside Oxfam and the EU Tax Observatory, and a second in Seville with NORAD, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty. The panel put Atlas research at the center of the global debate on financing development through progressive taxation.
Supporting international information transparency and reciprocity
The Atlas joined and supported the 10th African Tax Research Network (ATRN) Congress in Cape Town, where Hector Ulloa delivered a master class for African tax administrators and researchers on recent developments using leaked financial data.
The Atlas team published a public GitHub repository* with aggregate CRS statistics and code for researchers and tax authorities, alongside a report assessing how well the Common Reporting Standard actually captures offshore wealth: one benchmarking CRS coverage across 16 countries, another cross-checking CRS-reported account balances against the Atlas's own offshore wealth estimates to flag where transparency commitments still fall short in practice.
Teaching toolkit
We launched a Teaching Toolkit: a free, modular educational resource for high-school and undergraduate teachers, built to translate the Atlas's four datasets (profit shifting, offshore financial wealth, offshore real estate, effective tax rates) into classroom-ready material. It piloted in 2024–25 through a collaboration between Skatteforsk and Roald Amundsen high school in Norway, and now bundles five components around a common pedagogical logic: videos, research-oriented tasks, readings, tutorials for using the Atlas itself, quizzes, and workshop instructions.
Two years after the launch of the Atlas of the Offshore World, the throughline hasn't changed: hidden capital only stays hidden as long as it stays unmeasured. What 2025 added was reach — the same data that once lived only in a repository showed up in a Bangladeshi court filing, a Ugandan tax audit, a UN conference room in Seville, and a Norwegian classroom. Each of those moments is the real test of a research infrastructure like the Atlas: not how much data it holds, but how far that data travels once it leaves the site.
2026 raises the bar further. A new estimate of global offshore financial wealth lands this spring, the teaching toolkit is being adapted for undergrads and graduate students, and journalists across the globe, while partnerships that started as one-off panels — with ATAF, UNDP — are moving toward standing collaborations. The offshore economy got a little more visible in 2025. Our job now is to make it harder still to look away.