Over 32 tax-related pacts inked every month worldwide

An average of 32 bilateral agreements related to tax information sharing, are inked worldwide every month, since the G-20 leaders pledged to crack down on tax havens in April 2009.

“To date, since April 2009, over 440 agreements providing for exchange of information have been signed,” a senior official of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said from Busan, South Korea.

The Paris-based OECD, a grouping of mostly developed countries, is leading the initiatives on setting international tax standards. “(Out of the over 440 agreements,) 290 tax information exchange agreements and more than 150 double-taxation treaties or protocols to the treaties have been signed, including Article 26 which provides for information exchange to the standard,” the official said.

The official is in South Korea to attend the G-20 finance ministers’ meet, which concluded on Saturday. Immediately after its pledge to crack down on tax irregularities in April 2009, OECD came out with a list of countries based on their compliance with international tax standards.

Since last April, as many as 28 jurisdictions have joined the list of countries that have substantially implemented the international tax standards.