BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – WITH much progress made in signing Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs), the Federation only has four more to be signed to be in good international standing.
According to information coming from the Communications Unit of the Prime Minister’s Office (CUOPM), the Federation was able to meet an agreement with Belgium last Friday (Dec. 18).
The release, issued today (Dec. 22), informed that the TIEA was signed by OECS Ambassador to Brussels Her Excellency Shirley Skerritt on behalf of the Federation while the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Belgium, His Excellency Didier Reynders, signed on behalf of his country.
This brings to eight the total number of TIEAs signed by the Federation, three of which were signed within the last month.
The signing of this TIEA comes as good news to the Federation as it continues to make an effort to be removed from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) grey list. In early April of this year, global leaders agreed to introduce sanctions on “secretive” tax havens around the world, resulting in the OECD publishing a list of 30 countries that have committed to their tax standard but have not substantially implemented it.
St. Kitts and Nevis was named among the non-compliant countries on the list, while only two Caribbean islands, Barbados and the US Virgin Islands, were seen by the OECD as substantially implementing the standards.
Since talks of OECD ‘grey listing’ hit the nation, government has reached tax agreements with Monaco, The Netherlands, The Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, Denmark, New Zealand and Liechtenstein. The nation now needs only three additional TIEAs to be signed in order to join Barbados and the USVI on the OECD’s white list.
According to the government release, “The Federation has already initialled 9 other agreements - with the six Nordic countries which accounts for 6 agreements – the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and is waiting for dates for the signing of these agreements to be given to the Federation by these countries.”
TIEAs allow the signing parties to request tax information from each other for the purposes of tax investigations. Information may include banking data and information on ownership of companies and trusts.
