Analysis by The One Campaign, a U-S based anti-poverty group, suggests that at least $1 trillion dollars is being taken out of developing countries each year through shell companies, shady deals for natural resources, money laundering and tax evasion.

The report, Trillion Dollar Scandal, in preparation for the G20 Summit in November, argues money is not been siphoned off international aid but is being taken out of government budgets, which undermines a country's ability to manage its own solutions to problems like poverty, disease and hunger.

"Where corruption is allowed to thrive, it inhibits private investment, reduced economic growth, increases the cost of doing business, and can lead to political instability," argued the report's authors. "When governments are deprived of their resources ... the biggest toll is on children."

The report estimates as many as 3.6 million deaths could be prevented each year in poor countries if action was taken to end secrecy that allows corruption and criminality to thrive.

The report shows four areas that could benefit from transparency: anonymous shell companies, disclosure rules for companies, tax evasion and government records.

Anonymous shell companies

41.5 percent of company service providers approached to set up a phantom firm in the US required no identification whatsoever -- 2.5 times the rate in other countries. Phantom firms are used for money laundering, as they hide the identities of individuals, and they are completely legal.

In 2011 Reuters reported that at a single address in a small town in Wyoming, 2,000 shell companies were registered.

In one example in the report, Viktor Yanukovych, the recent president of Ukraine, had an extravagant home which was one-third owned by an anonymous U.K. shell company and two-thirds owned by an Australian bank.

In another example in Nigeria in 2011, "Subsidiaries of oil and gas firms, Shell and Eni, paid $1.1 billion to the Nigerian government for an off-shore block containing an estimated oil reserve of nine billion barrels. The government then transferred precisely the same amount to an account in the name of Malabu Oil & Gas, a phantom firm whose hidden owner was the country's former petroleum minister."

The way to expose shell companies, the report argues, would be beneficial ownership information of companies, trusts and similar legal structures publicily available in open data formats.

Disclosure Rules for Companies

The report states that between 2002 and 2012, natural resources exports from Africa increased five-fold, however corruption and mismanagement and secrecy means the benefits of these exports are not seen in government budgets. One method to correct this would be for natural resource companies to publicly disclosure they payments they make to governments on a country-by-country and project-by-project basis.

Tax evasion

Efforts to improve tax collection could help stabilize governments to pay for schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Companies would be required to disclose key financial information.

Publish Government Data

When governments publish information in open data formats and standards that can be easily accessed, it gives citizen's information on what their governments are doing and helps to hold them accountable for the use of public resources.