In their G20 Leaders’ Communiqué at the end of the G20 Brisbane Summit on 15-16 November 2014, the G20 Leaders welcomed the progress on the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action Plan and committed to finalising this work in 2015, including transparency of taxpayer-specific rulings found to constitute harmful tax practices.
The Leaders also:
- Welcomed progress being made on taxation of patent boxes.
- To prevent cross-border tax evasion, they endorsed the global Common Reporting Standard (CRS) for the automatic exchange of tax information (AEOI) on a reciprocal basis. G20 countries will begin to exchange information automatically with each other and with other countries by 2017 or end-2018, subject to completing necessary legislative procedures. The Leaders welcomed financial centres’ commitments to do the same “and call on all to join us”.
- Welcomed deeper engagement of developing countries in the BEPS project to address their concerns. G20 countries committed to will work with them to build their tax administration capacity and implement AEOI. Prime Minister Abbott said Australia will do its part by assisting the Philippines to implement the automatic exchange of tax information.
- Welcomed further collaboration by our tax authorities on cross-border compliance activities.
The G20 Leaders agreed to set an ambitious goal to lift the G20’s GDP by at least an additional 2% cent by 2018. Analysis by the IMF-OECD indicates that the commitments, if fully implemented, will deliver 2.1%. This is expected to add more than US$2 trillion to the global economy and create millions of jobs.
[LTN 222, 17/11/14]