OECD Tax Havens Deal Falls Short, Critics Say
Inter Press Service (IPS), May 8, 2009
– Jeffrey Owens, the tax point person of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was stung by activist critics of the OECD standards under which countries will be put on a tax haven blacklist and targeted for sanctions.
The blacklist was announced last month at the London meeting of the G20, which said in a communiqué that it would take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens…to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems.
Key civil society criticisms are that the OECD standards require bilateral agreements for information on request, not automatic multilateral tax information exchange; that they call for only 12 such agreements to be signed by each tax haven; and that getting off the blacklist entails only promises, which have not been kept by tax havens in the past.