This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out more here.  
  • Delicious




OECD Postpones 'Black-List' Sanctions Until 2001

Jeremy Hetherington-Gore, Tax-news.com, London

26 April 2000

The OECD has called off the planned June imposition of sanctions on offshore jurisdictions which will be included on its much-criticised 'tax havens black list'.

The news was given to the offshore jurisdictions by letter, and was confirmed yesterday in Paris by Frances Horner, head of the OECD's Tax Competition Unit, who said that the jurisdictions were being given a further year to adjust their regimes to conform with OECD guidelines, and that this was a direct reflection of their co-operative attitude towards the OECD initiative.

The OECD's 'Harmful Tax Practices Forum' was set up in May, 1998, although Switzerland and Luxembourg abstained from the OECD report on Harmful Tax Competition which created it. The jurisdictions may have been co-operative in private with the OECD - indeed many contacts and visits have been reported in the last year - but in public many of them have vociferously attacked the OECD's 'Harmful Tax Practices' Forum as nothing more than an expression of the rich countries' desire to prevent the growth of 'offshore' and the consequent leakage of tax revenues.

Mrs Horner said that the list of non-conforming IOFCs would still be published in June as planned, but that a further list would be published in June, 2001, of just those jurisdictions which had failed to adjust their regimes, and would be the target of sanctions. But it is possible that the OECD's move marks a tactical withdrawal from what had begun to seem an uncomfortable goal. Rumours of dissent within the OECD over the fiscal unit's initiative have surfaced (how can competition be unfair?) and some member countries at least are uneasy about appearing to bully small, poor islands which are completely dependent on financial services income. The OECD's recent report on information-exchange and banking secrecy was approved unanimously, and it may be that a global regime designed to detect and punish money-laundering is both more achievable and 'fairer' than the imposition of arbitrary standards on taxation regimes.

.

 

 






Write a comment