Letter to OECD and Global Forum on Common Reporting Standard
May 23rd, 2016
Recently, the FTC sent letters to Pascal Saint-Amans, head of the Center for Tax Policy and Administration at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Monica Bhatia, head of the Secretariat of the Global Forum. In these letters, and the attached proposal, we’ve asked OECD member governments to allow data from the new automatic information exchange system to be used to fight corruption.
The exchange system will allow, for example, France to see which of its citizens are holding money in German banks, and potentially not declaring this wealth to the government. In turn, Germany will receive information on its citizens’ accounts in France. This reciprocity is aimed to curb offshore tax evasion by wealthy elites; the amount of wealth stashed offshore is estimated between $7 and $32 trillion dollars worldwide.
But, despite numerous reasons this data would be of use in fighting corruption, it’s strictly reserved to tax matters and will not be available to law enforcement or anti-corruption agencies.