Finance committee  The list in 2009 was designed to disappear quickly. If a list is to be successful it needs to disappear. Let me explain why. In 2000, the OECD listed tax havens, meaning the jurisdictions that corresponded to the four criteria I referred to earlier. In 2002, the OECD did the lis

Finance committee  No, I couldn't. But very quickly, they are complementary. I think exchange on request is one thing, but you can also do automatic and you can do automatic on bank information, you can do automatic on salaries, on pensions, on many other items of income.

Finance committee  We have elaborated a model tax information exchange agreement. We are currently assessing the effectiveness of the information exchange agreement through TIEAs, through DTCs, so we very much support the initiatives consisting of negotiating for the tax information exchange agreem

Finance committee  The challenges are first with the countries unwilling to move towards automatic exchange of information because some stand ready, and nowadays all stand ready to give tax information exchange agreements or tax convention. The global forum is taking care of that to make sure that

Finance committee  Maybe before responding to your question, I can say that Costa Rica didn't vote this legislation. I was not aware of it. Costa Rica is now fully compliant with all the standards, and of course has put an end to bank secrecy so there is no death penalty for that. I'm not even sure

Finance committee  I fully agree that it all needs to start with proper implementation of the legislation and proper enforcement of the legislation. We have a very close relationship with the CRA, the Canada Revenue Agency, which partakes in the forum on tax administration where the tax commissione

Finance committee  Thank you for this question. Again I'm sorry to respond in English, but I heard your question in English through the interpretation. I have a couple of comments. One is that we have made very significant progress towards better transparency through exchange of information on req

Finance committee  FATCA is unilateral legislation, and the way it has been implemented is largely through bilateral agreements. If a country wants to negotiate an agreement with the U.S., it can negotiate this agreement, which can be reciprocal or not reciprocal. As regards the confidentiality par

Finance committee  Transfer pricing is a matter different from transparency. Transparency can help better implement transfer pricing rules, because if you have companies doing transactions with a secretive jurisdiction, you may lose track of the transaction and will not have the comparables, and

Finance committee  What I can describe is the trend, and the trend indeed is to lower the rates of corporate income tax. And that's an OECD recommendation. To favour investments you need to have reasonably low rates for corporate income tax, and on the other hand to improve compliance. This is why

Finance committee  No, I personally have a lot of difficulties measuring gaps. What you can do—what the U.S. and the U.K. are doing—to measure the tax gap is not focus on international economy but on the domestic, the underground economy and all that. That's what is measured through a tax gap. It's

Finance committee  Thank you very much for these questions. Again, we do not have any estimates. The only estimate we have is based on microdata. We reported to the G-20 last year that the progress in terms of transparency has yielded $15 billion euros over the past three years to some G-20 countri

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm not sure I would say that you need to measure it to tax it. I think you can tax it without measuring it. In the report that we have just issued, “Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”, we recognize or acknowledge that we don't know the amounts,

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. For technical reasons I will speak in English, if you don't mind, as there is translation and interpretation. I apologize to your French-speaking colleagues about that. They will have to suffer my poor English. Thank you for your invitation. I'm