IN order
to expand its capacity to fight international tax avoidance and evasion
Saint Lucia signed the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance
in Tax Matters on November 21, 2016. Saint Lucia became the 107th jurisdictions
to join the Convention.
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 the swift implementation of the standard on exchange
of information on request and the new OECD/G20 Standard for Automatic Exchange
of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters. The signing and ratification
of the Convention is therefore very timely since Saint Lucia has already signed
the CRS Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA) based on Article
6 of the Convention to operationalise automatic exchange of financial account
information. The Convention can also be used to swiftly implement the transparency
measures of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project such
as the automatic exchange of Country-by-Country reports under Action 13 as
well as the sharing of rulings under Action 5. A powerful tool for the fight
against illicit financial flows the Convention also enables jurisdictions to
implement the commitments they have each made as members of the Global Forum
on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.
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