1000s Of American Jobs Could Be Lost If This…

Leave it to bureaucrats to decide that while some competition is good, too much is bad. In a nutshell, that’s what the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) ongoing campaign against lower taxes is all about. And now, they’re taking it to a whole new level.

Back in 1998, the OECD’s Committee on Fiscal Affairs (CFA) released a report outlining what it perceived as a dangerous trend: more and more countries were reducing taxes. The OECD called this trend “harmful tax competition.” It was dangerous, according to the OECD, because it had the potential to reduce tax revenues in nations that didn’t wish to engage in tax competition.

To help fight harmful tax competition, the OECD proposed that low-tax countries be forced to cooperate in tax investigations by high-tax countries. It also called for sanctions against jurisdictions engaging in harmful tax competition.

While it hardly seemed possible in 1998 that the OECD would get its way, that’s exactly what happened. Fast forward to 2015, and the OECD’s “global information exchange standard” is nearly in place. The Obama administration gave the effort a big boost by enacting the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010, with the end result that more than 60 countries, including several low-tax jurisdictions, have agreed to exchange information on foreign customers in local banks, trust companies, etc., in order to avoid possible sanctions.

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