Along with more than 100 countries that adopt the guidelines on the Automatic Exchange of Information for the purposes of fiscal transparency (“AEOI”), Switzerland confirmed, on August 14, the inclusion of 33 countries within its automatic exchange network of information. Most of the countries on this list are comprised of Latin American jurisdictions.
AEOI is part of a series of measures devised by the Global Forum and the Financial Action Task Force (“FATF”) which seek to combat, on a global level, money laundering and terrorist financing.
With the implementation of AEOI, both bodies seek to offer an universal and practical basis for use of the contracting countries globally. This allows for automatic exchange of tax information to be collected within countries that support this platform.
AEOI represents a breakthrough in the implementation of the exchange of tax information by offering an automatic sharing of that data. For this reason, it represents an advance in comparison to the second model of information exchange devised by the same bodies, the ‘EIOR’. This last model assumes that the sharing will only occur through a request made by one interested country to another.
In this context, in order to expand its support to the AEOI guidelines, Switzerland is seeking to expand the network of countries with which it has an automatic exchange of tax information foundation. According to the Swiss Parliament’s Tax and Taxation Committees, this expansion is due to the positive result obtained with the information exchange so far.
The implementation and monitoring of these measures will be carried out by thematic committees of the Swiss Parliament. Even though the Parliament is evaluating the proposals on how this sharing will happen between the countries recently included in the data exchange network, he disclosed that the first exchange of tax information would take place still this year.
Published on October 5, 2020