“OECD’s Plan for Global Tax Info Exchange:
The OECD has released its Common Reporting Standard, a.k.a. a global Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information. The plan more or less tracks the so-called intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) that the US Treasury is using to try to get the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act working. But the OECDs model for the world differs in two critical respects:
1 it is based on the global standard of residence-based taxation
2 it would require reciprocity
In terms of reciprocity, what the US calls reciprocal with respect to data sharing is so far reciprocal in name only). A related issue that already exists under FATCA and will be expanded exponentially under the OECD plan is that reciprocity means every government bears the cost of incorporating expansive financial surveillance (in the case of the US, far beyond that required for all other countries) yet as the Tax Justice Network points out, this formal equality in fact introduces substantive inequality and potentially great harm to poorer countries. Readers of my prior work (on soft law, on the OECDs norm-creating role, and on its grappling with the issue of sovereignty) will know that I am cautious about the premise of accepting proclamations of the OECD about global tax norms. In the case of residence-based taxation, however, this is not an OECD-created norm but one that dates to the very beginnings of modern income taxation and while flawed is the best available structure if more than one country in the world is going to have an income tax and people are going to be allowed to leave their countries freely if they so choose.
http://taxpol.blogspot.ca/