Financial Transparency Coalition

The Swiss Federal Council on Wednesday issued a statement making it all too clear what it thinks “the new global standard for the automatic exchange of information in tax matters” should look like. This concerns the OECD’s ongoing project to create a new framework for international financial transparency, which we’ve written about before: while we found shortcomings, we welcomed the project overall. The OECD is expected to finalise its global standard in June. The Swiss position is a direct threat to global moves on transparency.

This article originally appeared on the blog of the Tax Justice Network, a coordinating member of the Financial Transparency Coalition. This blogger used to live in South Africa, not long after the end of Apartheid, where one of the common refrains he heard was “I am not a racist, but . . . ” – usually

This post originally appeared on the blog of Tax Justice Network, a Coordinating Committee member of the Financial Transparency Coalition.  If there’s one story you read today make it this one, from Politico Magazine. It’s triggered by the crisis in Ukraine, but it’s been a long time coming. The point of this short story is clear:

Last year Itai Grinberg, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in the U.S., published an important paper entitled Beyond FATCA: An Evolutionary Moment for the International Tax System, providing a comprehensive overview of the emerging international architecture of financial transparency, with different models of information exchange (see below) jostling for supremacy.