Brazil, Jamaica and Uruguay expand their capacity to fight international tax avoidance and evasion
Jamaica and Uruguay today signed the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters and Brazil deposited its instrument of ratification of the Convention on the occasion of the launch of the OECD’s Latin American and Caribbean Regional Programme and the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting. Jamaica and Uruguay became the 95thand 96th jurisdictions to join the Convention.
Margaret Jobson, Ambassador of Jamaica to Germany, and Danilo Astori, Uruguay’s Minister of Finance, signed the Convention in the presence of the OECD Secretary General, Angel Gurría and José Serra, Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Relations, deposited Brazil’s instrument of ratification, which signifies that the Convention will enter into force for Brazil on the 1st of October 2016.
The Convention provides for all forms of administrative assistance in tax matters: exchange of information on request, spontaneous exchange, automatic exchange, tax examinations abroad, simultaneous tax examinations and assistance in tax collection. It guarantees extensive safeguards for the protection of taxpayers’ rights.
The Convention was developed jointly by the OECD and the Council of Europe in 1988 and amended in 2010 to respond to the call by the G20 to align it to the international standard on exchange of information and to open it to all countries, thus ensuring that developing countries could benefit from the new more transparent environment.
Since then, the Convention has become a truly global instrument. It is seen as the ideal instrument for swift implementation of the new Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters developed by the OECD and G20 countries as well as automatic exchange of country by country reports under the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project. It is also a powerful tool for the fight against illicit financial flows. It also enables countries to implement the commitments they have each made as members of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.
