OECD: 15 countries sign updated Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters
May 27th, 2010
OECD | May 27, 2010
A boost to multilateral tax cooperation: 15 countries sign updated Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters
PARIS—In April 2009, the G20 called for action “to make it easier for developing countries to secure the benefits of the new cooperative tax environment, including a multilateral approach for the exchange of information.” In response, the OECD and the Council of Europe developed a Protocol amending the multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters to bring it in line with the international standard on exchange of information for tax purposes and to open it up to countries that are neither members of the OECD nor of the Council of Europe.
Today, the updated Convention was presented to Ministers and Ambassadors attending the annual OECD Ministerial meeting held in Paris and was signed by 11 countries already Parties to the Convention (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Italy, France, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States). In addition, Korea, Mexico, Portugal and Slovenia signed both the Convention and the amending Protocol.
The Convention provides for a wide range of tools for cross-border tax co-operation including exchange of information, multilateral simultaneous tax examinations, service of documents, and cross-border assistance in tax collection, while imposing extensive safeguards to protect the confidentiality of the information exchanged (see background brief for more information). Once the Protocol has entered into force, the Convention will become a more powerful tool for multilateral tax cooperation as it will enable a wider group of countries to become parties and will require full exchange of information on request in all tax matters without regard to a domestic tax interest requirement or bank secrecy for tax purposes.
For more information, contact Jeffrey Owens, Director of the OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, (e-mail: jeffrey.owens@oecd.org or tel.: +33 1 45 24 91 08).
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