India likely to pitch for deeper tax information exchange at G-20 meet

New Delhi is expected to present a detailed paper on the
issue at the forthcoming Seoul meeting, urging that domestic laws of countries
must support such agreements for effective information exchange.

In some countries, for instance, domestic laws relating to
privacy protection tend to come in the way of sharing information with other
countries, defeating the very purpose of such pacts.

The proposal for a multilateral information exchange comes
even as India has initiated talks with Switzerland for revising its tax treaty
to include tax information exchange agreements, or TIEA, to get details on
likely tax evaders.

New Delhi also wants the current system of peer review under
the global forum to ensure that such agreements are meaningful and have not been
entered into just to get a tax haven struck off from the list of non-compliant
countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Nearly
500 such bilateral pacts have been signed so far since last April, after the
G-20 pledged to crackdown on tax havens at the London summit.

Immediately after the G-20 pledge, the OECD came out with a
list of non-compliant countries, based on compliance with international tax
standards. Since last April, as many as 28 jurisdictions have joined the list of
countries that have substantially implemented the international tax standards.
Going by the latest OECD list, there are no jurisdictions that have not
committed to international tax standards where there were four countries — Costa
Rica, Malaysia (Labuan), the Philippines and Uruguay — in that category last
April.