The United States, Britain and Australia announced a joint effort Friday to expose tax dodgers with an investigation of a massive cache of bank account data from tax havens that was leaked to the authorities. The three countries said they are sharing the huge trove of data on accounts in Singapore, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands, which includes names of account holders and their advisers. Britain said it had identified more than 100 people who have been hiding money in offshore tax havens in scouring the data.

OTTAWA - As an international investigation of tax evaders broadens to include Canadian authorities, the federal government says it has convicted just 44 individuals of offshore tax cheating since 2006. And the total amount of fines levied — $6.8 million — is less than the $7.7 million in taxes that were evaded. Between April 2006 and March 2012, a total of 44 convicted tax evaders were collectively sentenced to 337 months in jail, an average of about seven months each.

By Rachel Armstrong, Saeed Azhar and John O'Callaghan SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Banks in Singapore are urgently scrutinizing their account holders as an imminent deadline on stricter tax evasion measures forces them to decide whether to send some of their wealthiest clients packing.

Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos and other British overseas territories with extensive financial centres have signed agreements to share tax information in what the British government hailed Thursday as a major victory in the battle against tax evasion. Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands have agreed to "much greater levels of transparency of accounts held in those jurisdictions", Britain's Treasury said.