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4 Jul, 2016

Dominican Republic, Nauru join the most powerful instrument against offshore tax evasion and avoidance

PARIS, OECD Press Release, 28 June 2016 – Today, at the OECD Headquarters in Paris, Mrs Rosa Hernández de Grullón, Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to France and Mr John Petersen, Advisor to the Minister of Finance of Nauru, signed the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters in the presence of Deputy Secretary General Rintaro Tamaki, therewith becoming the 97th and 98th jurisdictions to join the Convention.

In addition, Mr Peterson deposited Nauru’s instrument of ratification, which signifies that the Convention will enter into force for Nauru on the 1st of October 2016.

The Convention provides for all forms of administrative assistance in tax matters: exchange of information on request, spontaneous exchange, automatic exchange, tax examinations abroad, simultaneous tax examinations and assistance in tax collection. It guarantees extensive safeguards for the protection of taxpayers’ rights.

The Convention was developed jointly by the OECD and the Council of Europe in 1988 and amended in 2010 to respond to the call by the G20 to align it to the international standard on exchange of information and to open it to all countries, thus ensuring that developing countries could benefit from the new more transparent environment.

Since then, the Convention has become a truly global instrument. It is seen as the ideal instrument for swift implementation of the new Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters developed by the OECD and G20 countries as well as automatic exchange of country by country reports under the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project and is a powerful tool in the fight against illicit financial flows.

It is against that background that Nauru today also became the 83rd signatory of the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement which operationalises the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information, which Nauru has committed to implement with first exchanges by 2018.