LATAM Ministers Devote To Combat Tax Evasion And Corruption

Uruguay's Minister of Economy and Finance Danilo Astori hosted a discussion with Ministers, high level representatives and senior officials from Latin America on how to strengthen regional efforts to combat tax fraud and corruption.

Commitment

During the meeting, the Ministers and Deputy Ministers of Uruguay, Argentina, Panama and Paraguay entered into agreement called Punta del Este Declaration, in which they agreed to:

• Establish a Latin American initiative to maximize the effective use of the information exchanged under the international tax transparency standards to tackle tax evasion, corruption and other financial crimes and improve international tax cooperation to counter practices contributing to all forms of financial crimes;
• Lead by example in effectively using the powerful global infrastructure for exchange of information which has been built in the past decade to counter illicit financial flows and support domestic resource mobilization;
• Encourage all Latin American countries to further strengthen their efforts in tackling cross-border tax evasion, corruption and other financial crimes through closer cooperation, both at the global and regional levels, including in particular through more intense use of all the available exchange of information tools for the purpose of deterring, detecting and prosecuting tax evaders;
• Explore further means of cooperation including (i) wider use of the information provided through exchange of tax information channels for other law enforcement purposes as permitted under the multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters and domestic laws, and (ii) advance more effective and real-time access to beneficial ownership information across Latin America;

Besides signing the agreement, the ministries also encouraged other interested jurisdictions to join the regional initiative, with additional signatures anticipated in the near future.

Next Step

As a concrete action of the agreement, Latin Americans will establish national action plans to further these objectives and prepare the progress report of the agreement implementation for the next plenary meeting of the Global Forum.

Source: OECD