Miroslav Kalousek, the Czech finance minister, pledged to join the push for more automatic exchanges of bank records that already had the backing of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, a spokesman for the Czech representation to the European Union said Sunday.
The hope is that this blockchain, along with other alterations, will "provide a more secure, more reliable, more transparent, and more automatic way of exchanging money, securities, and other assets".
The aim is to achieve more automatic information integration and exchange to support decision making and co-operation.
"We agree that automatic exchange is more efficient, but it now allows tax administrations to make these requests, where before they were deprived of any means," said Mr. Saint-Amans of the O.E.C.D.
The muddled Dodd-Frank reforms, passed by Congress in America and now being implemented by regulators, supposedly go some way towards this; so does legislation being drafted in the EU.Campaigners also want to see more countries agree to the automatic exchange of tax information on non-residents.
More importantly, the convention doesn't require the automatic exchange of information, but rather exchange "on request", which has proven ineffective (because, in a classic Catch-22 situation, the requesting country often needs much of the information it is seeking in order to put together a request that meets the requirements of the jurisdiction where the untaxed money is thought to be stashed).
Some have been closed through amendments, more of which are proposed, but gaps will remain.Another problem with automatic exchange is the huge quantities of data it produces.
In fact, one of the main reasons why I am in favor of wealth taxation, international cooperation and automatic exchange of bank information is that this would be a way to develop more financial transparency and more reliable sources of information on wealth dynamics (even if the tax was charged at very low rates, which everybody could agree with).
Development campaigners said there was a bit more progress on allowing poor countries to be part of a new G8 deal on automatic exchange of tax information, but it remains to be seen when they will be allowed to do so.
Under an automatic exchange, governments would routinely transfer all foreign taxpayers' data to their home governments, making it far more difficult to hide assets from the tax collector.
