British Overseas Territories

Question

The Overseas Territories are separate jurisdictions and each has their own independent supervisory authority responsible for ensuring their financial services meet regulatory standards. The Overseas Territories are subject to assessment by the international standard setter for anti-money laundering, the Financial Action Task Force. This looks specifically at the effectiveness of each jurisdiction’s regimes. The Territories are due their next assessments over the coming years and the results of these will be publicly available.

In 2013, the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories agreed to begin bilateral automatic exchange of financial information for tax purposes with the UK ‎in 2016, in respect of 2014 data. These were ground breaking agreements and are expected to recoup over £1 billion of unpaid tax.

The Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories also committed in 2013 to be early adopters of the new global standard for automatic exchange, joining the initiative launched by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain and providing a lead to other jurisdictions. Along with the UK, in October 2014 the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories signed the legal agreements under which exchange will begin with over 50 countries in 2017 and over 90 countries in 2018. These agreements, under which a wide range of information concerning financial accounts of UK tax residents will be passed to HMRC automatically each year, will significantly enhance the ability of HMRC to tackle offshore evasion.

‎Monitoring of implementation of the global standard of automatic tax information exchange will be undertaken in due course by the Global Forum as requested by G20 Finance Ministers. Written assessments of the extent to which Global Forum members meet the existing standard of tax information exchange on request are publically available on the Global Forum’s website.