Financial Transparency Coalition

The following answer to a written question has been published by the States of Jersey today:

WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE CHIEF MINISTER BY THE DEPUTY OF ST. MARY ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON TUESDAY 18th JANUARY 2011 Question Can the Chief Minister inform members how many Tax Information Exchange Agreements were in force at the beginning of 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010? Can he further tell members, for each of those years, how many requests for information have been received, from how many countries they were received, and in how many cases was the information requested found and...

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...

We recently wrote about the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, describing it as a form of (albeit one-way) automatic information exchange, to help the U.S. tax authorities ferret out tax cheats. A new Reuters story (hat tip: Offshore Watch) highlights one of the effects:

Leumi (LUMI.TA), Israel's biggest bank, is requiring U.S. clients to declare their deposits to the Internal Revenue Service, amid heightened scrutiny of offshore accounts by U.S. authorities. The bank is asking its clients to declare that they are not U.S. clients, or to reveal their ...

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...