John Christensen and David Spencer of the Tax Justice Network have set out their arguments on how to tackle tax haven abuse in the FT today. I can do little better than recommend the whole article.
The key though is this:
It is time for radical approaches to make international finance more transparent. The focus must shift towards the infrastructure of cross-border economic crime, including accountants, lawyers and financial institutions - not just the legal mechanisms that underpin secrecy. Both of the main mechanisms - bank secrecy and secrecy of beneficial ownership of assets through offshore trusts and the like - must be tackled. Harmful yet legal tax practices must be targeted too and US legislators should enact the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act.
The OECD's approach to tax transparency requires information to be exchanged with other jurisdictions only on request. In other words, you must know what you are looking for before you request it. This is shockingly inadequate. We need the automatic exchange of tax information between jurisdictions and all developing countries must be included.
That's what we want. Is honesty too much to ask for?
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Interesting, but that simple suggestion would then give access to all UK account bank data to banks and institutions in Russia, Nigeria, and any other place where it’s security can’t be garanteed. Sure, countries like that can be excluded, but then they become new ‘safe’ havens. Not only that, but people who have large declared fortunes can even be targetted when traveling to other countries.
Why not just have one ‘CENTRAL’ bank where all the world’s acounts are held there with all the world’s banks merely being branches of it. That gives you one central database and no risk for sharing becasue all data is just to and from the ‘branch’ to the ‘bank’.
Honesty needs to be asked of all players. Sure this is menat to target some dishonest players, but the suggested solution will require the participation of others whose honesty is also in doubt.
Fred
As usual your comments are just wrong.
The data would only be available to the country in which a person resides
Richard