Through its disclosure facilities, HMRC learnt more about tax avoidance schemes, but from January 2021 further transparency under the DAC 6 EU directive give it greater firepower over offshore bank accounts, says Harbottle and Lewis’ Gary Ashford CTA
On 30 June 2020, the OECD published a press release setting out how the international community were making ‘tremendous progress’ in the fight against offshore tax evasion.
It announced that nearly 100 countries had carried out exchange of information in 2019, providing tax authorities with data on 84m financial accounts, covering total assets of €10tn (£9.1tn). This was attributed to successful progress in tax transparency introduced by the OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (the Global Forum).
The Global Forum was set up by the OECD at the request of the G20 after the financial crisis in 2009, where they stated that ‘the era of banking secrecy is over’. In 2010 the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters was introduced which underpins much of the work on international tax transparency, leading in part to the introduction of the Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters (Common Reporting Standard (CRS)) at the end of 2014, with the first reports taking place by early adopter countries (including the UK) in September 2017.
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