Switzerland, the world’s largest offshore financial centre, with $2.2 trillion in offshore assets, has committed to automatically share information regarding foreign bank accounts to other countries as part of a new global standard for information exchange.
Yesterday, during the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) annual Ministerial Council Meeting in Paris, all 34 member countries, and 13 more, endorsed the Declaration on Automatic Exchange of Information in Tax Matters, a crucial step in ending bank secrecy with regards to tax matters. A blacklist of uncooperative countries unwilling to sign up to transparency measures is likely to be drawn up by the OECD later this year.
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The Swiss Bankers Association said: "The banks in Switzerland are willing to adopt the automatic exchange of information along with other financial centres, provided that the exchanged information is only applied for tax purposes."
The Declaration commits countries, such as Brazil, China, Singapore and more, to implement a new single global standard on automatic exchange of information. Countries and jurisdictions are now obliged to obtain all financial information from their financial institutions and exchange that information automatically with other jurisdictions on an annual basis.
Angel Gurria, secretary general of OECD, said: "Tax fraud and tax evasion are not victimless crimes: they deprive governments of revenues needed to restore growth and jeopardise citizens’ trust in the fairness and integrity of the tax system. Today’s commitment by so many countries to implement the new global standard, and to do so quickly, is another major step towards ensuring that tax cheats have nowhere left to hide."
More than 60 countries and jurisdictions have committed to early adoption of the standard. Moreover, the OECD will deliver a commentary on the new standard, as well as technical solutions to implement the information exchanges, during a meeting of G20 finance ministers in September 2014.
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