Credit: MFIN
Ten years after the launch of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, some 70 Finance Ministers, including Luxembourg's Minister Pierre Gramegna, and 400 delegates met at the OECD in Paris on 26-27 November 2019 to analyse the progress made.
Since the creation of the Global Forum, some 100 countries, including Luxembourg, have exchanged information on 50 million bank accounts, representing a total value of €5,000 billion. "Today, we can say that banking secrecy is over," said Angel Gurria, the OECD Secretary General, in his opening speech at the tenth anniversary of the Forum. He added that "the work of the Global Forum has shown that multilateralism can work".
For his part, Luxembourg's Minister of Finance, Pierre Gramegna, welcomed the progress made in terms of transparency and said that "the key ingredient to success was getting a level playing field, which allowed us to move forward". Recognising that considerable progress had been made, Luxembourg joined the "early adopters" group in 2014 by signing the Berlin Convention on Automatic Exchange, together with some 60 states. In the most recent Global Forum Peer Review, Luxembourg achieved the overall compliant (largely compliant) rating in 2019 of the international standard for transparency and exchange of information.
In his conclusion, Minister Gramegna stressed that "multilateralism works in two areas: fiscal transparency and the fight against climate change". In this context, he maintained that fiscal transparency, fair taxation and a level playing field at the level of digital taxation will be the guarantors of sustainable development of today's societies and economies.
The next task of the Global Forum will be to evaluate the effectiveness of automatic information exchange. For this purpose, the member states will, under the coordination of the Global Forum, carry out a review of their peers in order to ensure that everyone is applying the rules and that the quality of information is guaranteed.
