Financial Transparency Coalition

The OECD’s Insight Blog has published a discussion between Christian Chavagneux (co-author of Tax Havens: How Globalisation Really Works) and the OECD’s Pascal Saint-Amans.

When the G20 signed the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters in November 2011, amid great fanfare, the OECD, a club of wealthy countries, set out to promote it as the 'gold standard' of international tax cooperation. As is often the case (see here or here), the OECD's viewpoint is not quite the full story. While the Convention definitely provides various positive things -- most importantly a tacit assertion that automatic information exchange must be part of effective information exchange -- it also includes clear downsides.

In August 2009, France and Switzerland amended their tax treaty. The new treaty stated that the two countries would from now on exchange upon request all information necessary for tax enforcement, including bank information otherwise protected by Swiss bank secrecy laws. In the following months, one of France’s richest persons and her wealth manager were taped discussing what to do with two undeclared Swiss bank accounts, worth $160 millions. After a visit to Switzerland, the wealth manager concluded that keeping the funds in Swiss banks or bringing them back to France would be too risky. He suggested that the...

Two weeks ago, the twenty most powerful leaders of the world headed to Cannes, France for the G20 Summit. It was the G20’s sixth meeting in a series of ongoing discussions about the world’s financial markets. While the meeting did not reach any concrete policy decisions on a host of important issues plaguing our financial world, some of the accomplishments of the meeting included a few pointed and poignant statements from some of the world’s most powerful. One of these statements came from Indian Prime Minister Manomohan Singh, who urged the world’s twenty most powerful countries to agree to...