More than 11.5 million documents were hacked from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. Credit:AP The papers have had more of an impact on the actions of individual world leaders than the OECD has had over the five years that it has been working on its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project aimed at stopping the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple from using tax havens. Thanks to the Panama leaks, Iceland's prime minister resigned. And other European leaders including David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have succumbed to public pressure and released personal tax information. The Panama Papers have also resulted in action closer to home: The Australian Taxation Office is investigating more than 800 wealthy clients of Mossack Fonseca. It has handed information relating to these taxpayers to AUSTRAC. As this investigation happens behind closed doors, another is taking place publicly. Labor has called for parliamentary hearings this week into tax avoidance and foreign bribery.

British Prime Minister David Cameron released his private tax information following the Panama Papers revelations. Credit:Getty Images Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan will give evidence at the Senate Economics References Committee later this week. The committee will also be hearing from regulatory agencies and experts on foreign bribery activities allegedly involving Australian firms. The Turnbull government's anti-avoidance laws are limited in scope. They apply to multinationals with a global income of $1 billion or more. This not only leaves out a number of big corporations, but also does not address tax evasion strategies used by wealthy individuals. Australia has also committed to information sharing via the OECD already country-by-country reporting plan. This aims to give tax authorities a clearer picture of taxes paid by companies, but there are two main problems with the plan. First, as we learnt when the G20 met in Washington last week, it requires governments to sign up and implement it. Panama is yet to sign, although it has promised it will. What's worse is the world's number one tax haven, the United States, isn't a signatory.

Clark Gascoigne, who works for Washington's FACT Coalition, said: "With all the attention on Panama, it's important to not miss the connections to the US, where Mossack Fonseca has affiliated offices engaged in similar business." Even assuming all countries do sign up to the OECD plan, the second problem looms: The tax information collected will be kept secret. The official line from the OECD is that making this information public would be misleading. But the true reason it's not going public: it was too hard to get governments to agree when big business lobbyists were arguing against such a move. The decision is costing them dearly. According to a recent report from Oxfam, Apple and General Electric routed nearly $US1.4 trillion in offshore tax havens between 2008 and 2014. US corporations avoid an estimated $US1.45 billion ($2.06b) of tax in Australia each year. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned tax avoidance has a "tremendously negative effect on our mission to end poverty".

Global Financial Integrity research estimates that tax haven secrecy, anonymous companies, trade-based money laundering and poor financial crime enforcement, drains at least $US1.1 trillion per year out of developing and emerging economies. To crack down on what the OECD dubs the "professional enablers" – the high-paid lawyers, accountants and financial institutions that hide behind the veil of secrecy – the best solution is transparency. The private information governments collect through the OECD's country-by-country plan, must be made public. There needs to be a public register of beneficial owners of companies, as suggested by Transparency International, in order to identify the names of company and trust owners. Finance ministers of the so-called Group of 5, from Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, agreed in a G20 meeting in Washington this month to exchange information on beneficial ownership registration. But as Carl Dolan, director of Transparency International EU, said, while this "initiative is being touted as a hammer blow" it is "more like a fly swat" because the register is being kept secret. There must also be greater transparency involving deals between tax authorities and companies. The ATO settled on about $3 billion worth of cases with big companies in 2013-14.