Elise Bean
From 1985 to 2014, Elise Bean worked for Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) conducting investigations, including 15 years at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). Appointed his PSI staff director and chief counsel in 2003, Ms. Bean handled investigations, hearings, and legislation on matters involving shell companies with hidden owners, money laundering, offshore tax abuse, corruption, and corporate misconduct. After Senator Levin retired in 2015, she helped establish the Levin Center at Wayne Law in his honor, and now works for the Center to help strengthen legislative capacities at the national, state, and international levels to conduct oversight investigations. In 2018, she became a published author of a book entitled, Financial Exposure: Carl Levin’s Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse.
Ms. Bean graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University and received a law degree from the University of Michigan. She clerked for the Chief Judge of the U.S. Claims Court, and worked for two years at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2018, Ms. Bean was recognized as a leader in tax justice matters by Global Witness. In 2016 and 2015, she was included in the Global Tax 50, a list compiled by the International Tax Review of the year’s top 50 individuals and organizations influencing tax policy and practice. In 2013 and 2011, the Washingtonian magazine named her one of Washington’s 100 most powerful women. In 2010, the National Law Journal selected her as one of Washington’s most influential women lawyers.
Jason Ward
Jason Ward is the founder and principal analyst of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research (CICTAR). Jason has been a frequent commentator on international corporate tax issues, including as a spokesperson for the Tax Justice Network – Australia, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Business at the University of Greenwich in the UK. In 2022, Jason Ward was included in the International Tax Review’s Top 50 most influential individuals in the world of tax policy.
Jason specializes in forensic financial analysis aimed at exposing aggressive tax avoidance strategies to help fuel progress on essential tax reforms.
Tim Hirschel-Burns
Tim Hirschel-Burns is a Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow in Oxfam America’s Extractive Industries team. His work focuses on corporate taxation, climate change, and human rights as they intersect with oil, gas, and mining. In 2022, Tim published “Countering Complexity’s Corporate Bias: Tax Simplification as a Strategy to Reduce Profit Shifting in the African Extractive Sector” in the Yale Journal of International Law and has also published work in Foreign Policy, Just Security, and African Arguments. Tim is a graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College, and previously lived in Benin.
Tim’s tax work focuses on international corporate taxation and tax transparency in the natural resource sector.
Robert Stewart
Robert Stewart is a Tax and Disclosure Advocate with Public Citizen, and currently represents District 23 in the Alabama State Senate. Previously, he served as a district staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives where he was responsible for a variety of constituent stakeholder concerns with the IRS, VA, government/municipal relations, and community outreach. Prior to that position, he had a wide range of accounting experiences being employed in the nonprofit, state government, corporate, and regional public accounting firm sectors. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Tuskegee University and earned a master’s degree in accounting from Kennesaw State University. Additionally, he is a 2019 graduate of the Congressional Black Caucus Institute Boot Camp, which trains emerging leaders for public service.
Raymond Baker
Raymond Baker is the Founding President of Global Financial Integrity and the author of Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, published by John Wiley & Sons and cited by the Financial Times as one of the “best business books of 2005.” He has for many years been an internationally respected authority on corruption, money laundering, growth, and foreign policy issues, particularly as they concern emerging market and developing countries and impact western economic and foreign interests. He has written and spoken extensively, testified often before legislative committees in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, been quoted worldwide, and has commented frequently on television and radio in the the United States, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia on legislative matters and policy questions, including appearances on ABC News’ Nightline, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg TV, the CBS Evening News, CNN, NPR, PBS, and Four Corners (ABC1 in Australia), among others.
Mr. Baker founded Global Financial Integrity in 2006, and the GFI team has produced more than 25 economic analyses of resource transfers affecting countries, regions, and the world. GFI has led in securing the terminology and the reality of illicit financial flows onto the global political-economy agenda. He also serves on the Policy Advisory Board of Transparency International-USA and on the Advisory Board of the Ethical Research Institute.
In 1996 he received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a project entitled, “Flight Capital, Poverty and Free-Market Economics.” He serves on the World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on the Illicit Economy. He traveled to 23 countries to interview 335 central bankers, commercial bankers, government officials, economists, lawyers, tax collectors, security officers, and sociologists on the relationships between bribery, commercial tax evasion, money laundering, and economic growth. From 1985 to 1996 Mr. Baker provided confidential economic advisory services at the presidential level for developing country governments. Activities focused principally on issues surrounding anti-corruption strategies, international terms of trade, and developing country debt. Research was conducted with 550 business owners and managers in eleven countries, concerning import and export mispricing and movement of tax-evading capital, and money laundering.
From 1976 to 1985 Mr. Baker conducted extensive trading activities throughout Latin America and in ten Asian countries including the People’s Republic of China. An affiliated company in London handled transactions in Europe. From 1961 to 1976 he lived in Nigeria and established and managed an investment company which set up and acquired manufacturing and financing ventures, the subject of two Harvard Business School case studies. Educated at Harvard Business School and Georgia Institute of Technology, Mr. Baker is the author of “The Biggest Loophole in the Free-Market System,” “Illegal Flight Capital; Dangers for Global Stability,” “How Dirty Money Binds the Poor,” and other works published in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
Susan Harley
Susan is the deputy director for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, where she helps coordinate all aspects of the division’s advocacy across multiple issue campaigns, specializing in financial reform, international tax issues and open government initiatives. Susan received her bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and received her J.D., cum laude in public law and regulation from MSU’s College of Law. She is a member of the State Bar of Michigan. Prior to joining Public Citizen, she worked as the Michigan policy director of Clean Water Action and Clean Water Fund.
Media Appearances: Susan has been quoted or published in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Roll Call, The Hill, American Banker, The Nation, TIME, Consumerist, Detroit News, Huffington Post and ValueWalk among other media. Susan has appeared on C-SPAN, Boom Bust, America’s Workforce Radio, The Union Edge, Uprising with Sonali, Living Room, Saturday Morning Talkies, KBOO/Portland and other broadcast media outlets.
Tom Cardamone
Tom Cardamone is the President and CEO of Global Financial Integrity (GFI). Mr. Cardamone is responsible for the strategic planning and promotion of organizational goals and policy positions to key audiences, including high-level government officials and multilateral institutions. He also leads promotion of GFI’s trade risk-assessment database GFTrade, which enables developing country customs officials to better detect instances of trade misinvoicing in order to capture more domestic resources.
Throughout his career, Mr. Cardamone has served as an analyst, consultant, project director and executive director to several non-profit organizations. He has advocated numerous policy positions related to increasing global financial security and transparency through appearances on CNN, CNBC, Canadian Broadcasting, as well as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. He has delivered remarks on various policy issues to the UN, the OECD and has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Tutu Alicante
Tutu Alicante is from Annobón, Equatorial Guinea. Before founding EG Justice, Tutu worked as a legal consultant with international NGOs, promoting legal accountability and transparency in the extractive industry. In 2007, he received a fellowship from Echoing Green to establish EG Justice. Prior to that, he worked as an employment attorney with the Southern Migrant Legal Services, where he represented migrant farm-workers. Tutu holds a Masters in Law degree from Columbia Law School and a law degree from the University of Tennessee.
Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins is the Director the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org.
He is author of the forthcoming book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Billions (Polity Press), about the wealth defense industry. He is an expert on tax policy, illicit finance, dynasty trusts, family offices, and solutions to individual and corporate wealth hiding. He has written numerous articles about the Panama Papers, illicit finance in real estate, the Luanda Leaks, the wealth defense industry, and how lack of transparency contributes to economic inequality.
He is author of a number of studies examining anonymous shell companies and luxury real estate including Towering Excess: The Perils of the Luxury Real Estate Boom for Bostonians and Who is Buying Seattle?
Collins is author of the popular book, Born on Third Base (Chelsea Green) and Is Inequality in America Irreversible? is published by the Oxford, UK-based Polity Press. He is co-author, with Bill Gates Sr., of Wealth and Our Commonwealth, (Beacon Press, 2003), a case for taxing inherited fortunes. He is a board member of the Patriotic Millionaires and launched a global call in January 2020, at the Davos World Economic Forum, for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes and stop global tax evasion.
John Keenan
John Keenan is a Corporate Governance Analyst for Capital Strategies for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which is the largest union in the AFL-CIO representing state and local government, health care and child care workers. John serves on the board of the Council of Institutional Investors, where he previously co-chaired the its Shareholder Advocacy Committee. Before joining AFSCME, he was a proxy voting analyst at Institutional Shareholder Services and also a paralegal in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of Brown University.
Steve Wamhoff
Steve Wamhoff is ITEP’s director of federal tax policy. In this role, he is responsible for setting the organization’s federal research and policy agenda. He is the author of numerous reports and analyses of federal tax policies as well as in-depth policy briefs that outline how the federal income tax and corporate tax code can be overhauled to improve tax fairness.
Just before taking on the role of ITEP’s director of federal tax policy, Steve spent more than two years as the senior tax policy analyst for Sen. Bernie Sanders and as a member of the senator’s Budget Committee staff. In this capacity, he wrote legislation related to personal income and corporate income taxes, financial transaction taxes, estate taxes and tax avoidance.
Before joining Sen. Sanders’ staff, Steve had previously worked for ITEP and its c(4) partner Citizens for Tax Justice for more than eight years. During this time, he built expertise is analyzing tax policies and their effect on federal revenue as well as on people across the income spectrum. Notably, he wrote reports on proposals to extend the George W. Bush tax cuts, as well as proposals to eliminate tax breaks for for investors and corporations as a way of financing health care reform and other initiatives.
Earlier in his career, Steve worked for the Social Security Administration’s Office of Policy and the Coalition on Human Needs. He received a Juris Doctor and Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s from New York University.