SINGAPORE, a popular tax haven in Asia, has decided to join the OECD initiative on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, to avoid any sort of hostility witnessed by Switzerland in the recent past. It is reported that the Singapore Govt has decided to amend the tax laws so that no court order is required to share banking or trust companies information with any official request coming from a DTAA partner.

The Singapore's decision has come in the wake of the rising pressure from the G-20 Forum. Governments in Europe and in the United States have been stepping up their efforts to clamp down on tax evasion as they try to deal with rising levels of public debt in step with the strengthening of international standards for exchange of information. It is going to adopt the OECD standards on information sharing in all of its existing bilateral tax agreements that do not already contain them, as long as it gets reciprocity. It will then meet the international standards on tax information sharing with up to 83 different jurisdictions, up from the current 41. Those new countries include the United States and Brazil.