Financial Transparency Coalition

H M Revenue & Customs has, as many will be aware, announced a new penalty regime for offshore disclosures. As they say:

These new penalties come into force from 6 April 2011 and apply to Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax. The legislation can be found in Schedule 10 of Finance Act 2010. The new penalty is an enhancement of the penalties for

I reported yesterday that the zero / 10 tax regimes adopted by all three of the Crown Dependencies have failed the test set by the European Commission for compliance with the EU Code of Conduct for Business Taxation (Guernsey has failed by default). There are those who do, of course, wish to ignore the news and that is their prerogative. I admit that this is a leak, but one which I’m entirely confident is right. Failure on three out of five counts is a dramatic rejection of the deliberately abusive structure of zero...

I noted the following this morning after Guernsey emailed me about it:

Guernsey plans timing for move to automatic exchange of information Guernsey’s Government has announced that it plans to give financial institutions a window from 1st January 2011 to 1st July 2011 for moving to automatic exchange of information. The Fiscal and Economic Policy Group carried out a public consultation earlier in the summer and this morning Chief Minister Lyndon Trott told the local Parliament, the States of Guernsey, of the planned transition to automatic exchange of information for the equivalent...

A while ago we pointed to a study by Misereor that had concluded, on the subject of double tax treaties (DTTs) and tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs), that Only 6 percent of DTTs show a signature of a Low Income Country (with an even smaller participation of 3 percent for Least Developed Countries). The situation with TIEAs is even worse: There is no single LIC (leaving aside LDC) as signing party of any TIEA documented on the OECD website. . . . While G20 and OECD are promoting DTTs and TIEAs as centrepieces of a global standard on transparency...