Nick Shaxson ■ New report: OECD’s new info exchange standard a watershed moment?

New report: OECD’s new info exchange standard a watershed moment?

Nick Shaxson

Published:

14 March 2014

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Category:

Financial secrecy ↘ Automatic exchange of information ↘

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A month ago we published a short, quick reaction to a new report by the OECD, outlining the nuts and bolts of a major new international system for information exchange. We have now spent quite some time exploring the OECD’s report, and have written a much more detailed response.

Our new report is entitled OECD’s Automatic Information Exchange Standard: A watershed moment for fighting offshore tax evasion ?.

There are many positive details in the report: it is wide in its scope, covering not just individuals but trusts and foundations, and various investment entities. There is a special focus on due diligence checks, a crucial element in any transparency regime. It even takes measures to tackle the multi-trillion dollar question of ‘ownerless assets.’

Yet there are a number of shortcomings in the report, too: some technical, and some political.

Read more about it in the International Tax Review, via our earlier blog.

The author

Nick Shaxson

Nicholas Shaxson is a journalist and writer on the staff of Tax Justice Network. He is author of the book Poisoned Wells about the oil industry in Africa, published in 2007, and the more recent Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the Men who Stole the World, published by Random House in January 2011. He lives in Berlin.

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