Media coverage of these leaks tends to carry a whiff of hope that exposure will somehow lead to reform. But, as the new leak makes plain, a year and a half after the last big leak—and multiple years after governments around the world have launched pro-transparency legal initiatives—little has changed in the intricate, hemisphere-spanning networks of lawyers and consultants who specialize in tax avoidance.

This is not to downplay the far-reaching consequences of the Panama Papers. “On the micro level, for individuals, things changed tremendously,” says Jake Bernstein, an investigative reporter who worked on the Panama Papers and has written a forthcoming book about them called Secrecy World. “Things have changed for the prime minister of Pakistan, the prime minister of Iceland, the minister of industry of Spain”—three prominent leaders who stepped down after their names appeared in the leak.

But while some wealthy and powerful individuals suffered personally, the system itself remains perfectly intact. “I don’t know that anything has changed as a result of the Panama Papers, and I don’t really expect anything will change as a result of the Paradise Papers,” says Brooke Harrington, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School who has studied the wealth-management industry (and written about it for The Atlantic).

Harrington notes that governments and organizations have put out a handful of fixes in recent years, but in general she finds them lacking. There is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which kicked in a few years ago and requires foreign banks to tell the IRS about accounts they have that are held by Americans. There is an initiative by the OECD, an organization of developed countries, that asks its members to share information from their financial institutions with each other. And after the Panama Papers, there was talk of requiring American banks to determine the true owners of shell companies, but little headway has been made on that.

The problem, Harrington says, is that wealth-management firms “have 24/7/365 to do nothing but find ways around whatever laws you think up.” (Indeed, Harrington, who trained as a wealth manager as part of her academic study of the profession, has attended a class on how to get around that very OECD initiative.) She says that trying to figure out the right laws to implement misses the point. It’s not just that rich people and companies will sidestep them, but also that, in order to work, they require all countries to cooperate completely, a near impossibility as long as smaller countries can break ranks and build (or at least attempt to build) their economies around being tax havens.

Harrington says there are other, more effective things that governments and politicians could do. Though leaking may not directly lead to systemic change, it can serve to deter some wrongdoing, and to that extent, she says it’s important to make sure potential whistle-blowers feel they can conceal their identities. She described many of the wealth managers she’d interviewed for her research, many of whom felt bad about their work: “They’re middle-aged people. They’re locked into a fairly lucrative career. They have mortgages to pay and kids to support.” Risking their jobs isn’t an attractive option. One important thing that enabled the Panama Papers leaker or leakers, then, was that they felt secure that they would remain anonymous. “[The leaker], for all we know, is still working as a wealth manager somewhere,” Harrington says.