At the beginning of September, the Global Forum, an OECD body that seeks to implement greater transparency and exchange of tax information globally, published its second round of assessments regarding the implementation of actions aimed at fiscal transparency by countries.
The aforementioned assessments made by the Global Forum, being the first carried out in 2010, seeks to determine the extent of each member country’s cooperation in matters related to transparency and exchange of tax information.
In this year’s assessment, all Latin American countries included in the report [Uruguay and Chile] achieved good results, remaining classified as “largely compliant” in the body’s tax transparency criteria.
Despite remaining in the same classification, this year’s assessment was based on more rigorous criteria involving the central theme of the report. Among them, there is a more accentuated charge in the assessment criteria on the disclosure of information referring to the beneficial owners of companies based within a certain country, being disapproved in this criteria a large part of the evaluated countries.
And that was one of the reasons that helped Uruguay to be well evaluated in the report. The reason for that is because the country hopes to expand access to obtain information from the beneficial owners of companies based in Uruguay. Another reason is that it signed the OECD Mutual Assistance Convention in 2016.
At the same level, Chile obtained a good evaluation for having expanded its tax information exchange network to 137 countries in total. Likewise, the jurisdiction has projects to expand the disclosure of information about beneficial owners, and, at the moment, only banks are required to make this disclosure and only for specific legal entities.
Brazil, however, was not included in this year’s assessment. Nonetheless, in the last two rounds in which it was evaluated, during 2013 and 2018, it obtained the classification “largely compliant”. The highlight between one assessment and another was due to improvements in the disclosure about the beneficial ownership of Brazilian legal entities.
Published on October 5, 2020