14/12/18

USA: EU’s Expanded Tax Haven Blacklist Could Apply to U.S.

(Bloomberg) The European Union plans to update its year-old blacklist of tax havens to include new criteria and an expanded geographic reach—possibly all the way to the U.S.

The bloc has previously threatened that the U.S. could wind up on the blacklist, along with the likes of Guam and Trinidad and Tobago, unless it adopts stricter financial reporting standards and agrees to share that information with other tax authorities.

The 2019 blacklist of tax havens will include those that haven’t adopted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Common Reporting Standard, like the U.S. The standard calls on countries to obtain information from their financial institutions and automatically exchange it with other countries every year.

“So far the Trump Administration has not moved to adopt the OECD Common Reporting Standard,” Paul Tang, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, told Bloomberg Tax in a Dec. 8 interview.