The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting in Indonesia on Friday would not lift the tax haven status on Botswana but instead called for further improvements to the country’s legal and regulatory frameworks for exchange of information in tax matters.
Despite recent amendments to the Income Act and Banking Act to create transparency members of the OECD’s Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes who met in Jakarta, Indonesia to implement a global call for greater international cooperation against tax evasion would not give Botswana a clean bill of health.
The meeting published new compliance ratings for 50 countries and jurisdictions on practical implementation of the Global Forum’s information exchange standard. Eighteen jurisdictions were rated as compliant, 26 as largely compliant two as partially compliant and four jurisdictions as non-compliant, including the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Luxembourg and the Seychelles. Fourteen other countries were not given compliance ratings, pending further improvements to their legal and regulatory frameworks for exchange of information in tax matters. They included Botswana, Brunei, Dominica, Guatemala, Lebanon, Liberia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates and Vanuatu. Switzerland was rated as conditional.
At a G-20 summit two years ago, French president Nicolas Sarkozy called for Botswana, alongside eleven other countries, to be excluded from the international business community because the country was a tax haven that did not have a “suitable legal framework for the exchange of tax information.”
In a more to align the Botswana tax and financial regime with international standards the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning pushed through amendments to the Income Act and Banking Act.
The amendments give the Commissioner General of Botswana Unified Revenue Service (BURS) powers to obtain and provide information requested by foreign tax authorities from local banks.
