The OECD Presented the Standard of the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters

The standard provides an idea about the annual automatic exchange between countries of financial account information, including the information on accounts, interests, dividends, income received from sale of financial assets and the information received by the government from financial institutions on individuals and legal entities, including trusts and funds. The new consolidated version of the standard includes comments and guidelines for its implementation by governments and financial institutions, detailed model agreements and standards for harmonization of technical and IT decisions, in particular, the standard format and requirements for a safe data transfer.

Over 65 countries and jurisdictions, including Russia have officially confirmed their intensions to introduce the standard; it is to be noted that over 40 countries expect to carry out their first automatic exchange as early as 2017. Russia is not among those countries.

The standard will be officially presented by the OECD at the next meeting of finance ministers of the Group of 20 which takes place on September 20-21, 2014 in Cairns, Australia.

Despite the fact that the standard is not applied so far, from 2009 within the frameworks of a voluntary disclosure of the information almost 500,000 taxpayers worldwide voluntarily reported about their income and property (euro 37bn) which were concealed from tax authorities.

Introduction of the standard is an important step towards greater transparency and upgrading of the exchange of tax information between countries and permits actual realization of a number of international and Russian tax initiatives.

Yelena Velikova, Senior Researcher of the Center for Macroeconomics and Finance