Civilization works only if those who enjoy its benefits are prepared to pay their share of costs. People and companies that avoid taxes are unpopular at the best of times, so it is not surprising that, when governments and individuals everywhere are scrimping to pay their bills, attacks are mounting on tax havens and those that use them.

In Europe the anger has focused on big firms. Amazon and Starbucks have faced consumer boycotts for using clever accounting tricks to book profits in tax havens while reducing their bills in the countries where they do business. Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain has put tackling corporate tax-avoidance at the top of the G8 agenda.

America has taken aim at tax-dodging individuals and the banks that help them. Congress has passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which forces foreign financial firms to disclose their American clients. Any whiff of offshore funds has become a political liability. During last years presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney was excoriated by Democrats for his holdings in the Cayman Islands. Now Jack Lew, President Barack Obamas nominee for treasury secretary, is under fire for once having had an interest in a Cayman fund.

Getting rich people to pay their dues is an admirable ambition, but this attack is both hypocritical and misguided. It may be good populist politics, but leaders who want to make their countries work better should focus instead on cleaning up their own backyards and reforming their tax systems.

The archetypal tax haven may be a palm-fringed island, but there is nothing small about offshore finance. If you define a tax haven as a place that tries to attract nonresident funds by offering light regulation, low or zero taxation and secrecy, then the world has 50 to 60 such havens. These serve as domiciles for more than two million companies and thousands of banks, funds and insurers. Nobody really knows how much money is stashed away, but estimates vary from way less than to way more than $20 trillion.

Not all these havens are in sunny climes, and indeed not all are technically offshore. Obama likes to cite Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is officially home to 18,000 companies, as the epitome of a rigged system. Ugland House is not a patch on Delaware, though, which has a population of 917,092 and is home to 945,000 companies, many of which are fraudulent shell entities. Miami is a massive offshore banking centre, offering depositors from emerging markets the sort of protection from prying eyes that their home countries can no longer get away with.

Across the Atlantic, the City of London, which pioneered offshore currency trading in the 1950s, still specializes in helping nonresidents get around the rules. British shell companies and limited-liability partnerships regularly crop up in criminal cases. London is no better than the Cayman Islands when it comes to controls against money laundering. Other European Union countries are global hubs for a different sort of tax avoidance: Companies divert profits to brass-plate subsidiaries in low-tax Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Reform should thus focus on rich-world financial centres as well as Caribbean islands, and should distinguish between illegal activities such as laundering and outright tax evasion, and legal ones such as fancy accounting to avoid tax.

The best weapon against illegal activities is transparency, which boils down to collecting more information and sharing it better. Thanks in large part to Americas FATCA, small offshore centres are handing over more data to their clients home countries, even as America remains shamefully reluctant to share information with the Latin American countries whose citizens hold deposits in Miami.

That must change. Everyone could do more to crack down on the use of nominee shareholders and directors to hide the provenance of money. They also should make sure that information about the true beneficial owners of companies is collected, kept up-to-date and made more readily available to investigators in cases of suspected wrongdoing. There are costs to openness, but they are outweighed by the benefits of shining light on the shady corners of finance.

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Some tax havens closer to home than Cayman Islands