{"id":18257,"date":"2012-11-19T11:07:12","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T11:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=18257"},"modified":"2012-11-19T11:07:12","modified_gmt":"2012-11-19T11:07:12","slug":"the-worlds-tax-havens-are-just-laughing-at-regulation-meant-to-control-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/11\/19\/the-worlds-tax-havens-are-just-laughing-at-regulation-meant-to-control-them\/","title":{"rendered":"The world’s tax havens are just laughing at regulation meant to control them"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2009 the\u00a0Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said it was going to crack down on tax havens by demanding that they open themselves to all comers who wanted information they held on tax abusers.<\/p>\n

Then we learned that actually this meant that tax havens \/ secrecy jurisdictions\u00a0must sign at least twelve (yes, I mean 12) of the absolutely useless\u00a0tax information exchange agreements<\/a>. There are, of course, about 200 tax adminsitrations in the world but 12\u00a0treaties\u00a0were\u00a0enough\u00a0for the OECD apparently. Reconcile that if you can.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0what\u00a0did the tax havens do? They promptly signed enough\u00a0agreements with the most useless places they could find, or\u00a0with\u00a0each other. At the last count I reckoned there were 518 of these agreements. But just look at the following list of absolutely useless ones that we can be quite sure will never be used and it's easy to see why there has been no real change in the tax haven\u00a0world\u00a0as a result of the OECD's action. This list\u00a0is\u00a0almost 20% of the total such agreements:<\/p>\n