OECD and Argentina have signed MoU to fight against growing financial crimes. OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría and Argentina’s Minister of Treasury Nicolás Dujovne presided over the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a centre of the OECD Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The signing, which took place in the margins of the meeting of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in Buenos Aires, establishes the OECD Latin America Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation, to be housed in the facilities of Argentina’s Federal Administration of Public Revenues. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Argentina’s Commissioner of Public Revenues Leandro Cuccioli and the OECD’s Director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration Pascal Saint-Amans.

The OECD Latin America Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation will provide intensive capacity-building courses targeted at tax crime investigators and other related law enforcement officials, including prosecutors, anti-money laundering and anti-corruption officials, in particular from Latin American countries, that will support tax crime investigators throughout their careers. This will include broad-based courses on conducting and managing financial investigations as well as targeted courses on specific types of tax and financial crimes, such as those associated with crypto-currencies, money laundering and VAT fraud.

“The establishment of the OECD Latin America Academy here in Buenos Aires to train investigators in using the latest techniques to deter, detect and prosecute financial crime such as tax fraud, money-laundering or corruption, will strengthen Latin America’s capacity to tackle these crimes,” Mr Gurría said. “We are very grateful to the Argentine authorities for supporting this initiative.”

Illicit financial flows, including tax evasion and other financial crimes, have a large cost to government budgets and threaten the strategic, political and economic interests of all countries, with a particularly damaging impact in developing countries. These activities thrive in a climate of secrecy, inadequate legal frameworks, lax regulation, poor enforcement and weak inter-agency co-operation. Programmes offered by the OECD Latin America Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation will be an important contribution to the wider work of the OECD Oslo Dialogue, which promotes a whole-of-government approach to fighting financial crime.

The establishment of the OECD Latin America Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation builds on the success of the original centre hosted by the Gaurdia di Finanza in Ostia, Italy, and a pilot Africa Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation launched by the OECD, Kenya, Italy and Germany at the G20 Africa Partnership conference in June 2017. Together, these efforts have trained more than 550 financial investigators from over 80 countries. The first events planned for the OECD Latin America Academy for Tax and Financial Crime Investigation are scheduled to begin in late 2018.