Over the past decade, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has led the development of pivotal tax transparency agreements in an effort to put an end to bank secrecy and tackle offshore tax evasion and avoidance.
One of them, the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), agreed in 2014, revolutionised tax transparency by requiring financial institutions to report information on taxpayers’ offshore income and financial assets, which jurisdictions across the world then automatically exchange to help identify non-compliance. The digitalisation of the economy and the rapid development of crypto and other intangible assets resulted in the OECD revising the CRS and approving a new Crypto Asset Reporting Framework in August 2022.
The EU is also increasingly interested in this area. Over the last 10 years, there have been efforts to strengthen the cooperation among Member States through the Directive on Administrative Cooperation (DAC), as well as proposals to tackle the misuse of shell companies for tax purposes and the role of tax intermediaries in facilitating tax abuse.
More broadly, in the anti-money laundering and illicit finance space, countries globally have been moving towards the use of beneficial ownership registers as a key transparency tool to combat economic crime. This has already positively benefitted the tax transparency system but there are still unresolved questions about how such tools can be made truly global and bespoke to tax to combat offshore non-compliance.
Join this half-day conference organised by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and the UK Mission to the EU to discuss the effectiveness of existing transparency frameworks in tackling offshore tax evasion and tax avoidance, and the future holds in terms of challenges to overcome and opportunities to exploit.
More speakers to be confirmed
