Last week, Chancellor George Osborne launched his latest attack on those seeking to avoid or evade the payment of taxes by concealing money in off-shore accounts.
The move followed an earlier meeting between G20 finance ministers in Australia, in which ministers endorsed the new global standard for automatic exchange of tax information unveiled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
At present the UK has agreements with Crown dependencies and Overseas Territories on the sharing of information on off-shore accounts held by UK taxpayers. It hopes that, following agreements reached with France, Spain, Italy and Germany last year, the new global standard will be put into operation in the near future, allowing it to access information from the 42 countries and jurisdictions that have already joined the project.
This, says the Government, should make it increasingly difficult for UK taxpayers to hide assets abroad on which UK tax should be paid.
For the future, the G20 has said that it will work to ensure that developing economies will benefit, alongside the developed economies, from automatic information sharing.
The G20 has also said that it will now focus on global corporations who seek to avoid paying tax by moving profits from state to state. The OECD is currently working on a base erosion and profit shifting project to address this issue.
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This blog post is intended as a news item only - no connection between Lewis Nedas and the parties concerned is intended or implied.
