​Ministry of the Treasury signs tax information exchange agreements with the territories of Jersey and Guernsey

A third agreement is planned to be signed in the next few days with the representative of the Isle of Man, also at the Spanish Embassy in London. These agreements have been made possible by the United Kingdom authorising these British Crown Dependencies to negotiate and conclude them on their own behalf.

The tax information exchange agreements between Spain and Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man represent a significant step forward in terms of instruments for preventing tax fraud, and will have a major effect on the fight against international tax fraud.

Through this kind of agreement, drawn up in accordance with the OECD model agreement on exchange of information on tax matters, the territories undertake to gather and make available all information that may be of interest for calculating, settling and collecting taxes, the collection and enforcement of taxes claimed and the investigation and prosecution of cases related to tax matters. It will no longer be possible to claim banking secrecy. As soon as the agreements begin to have an impact and the exchange of information becomes effective, these territories will no longer be considered tax havens.

In the case of Spain, included within the scope of the agreement are all State taxes, including personal income tax and tax for non-residents, corporate income tax, wealth tax, inheritance and gift tax, capital transfer tax and stamp duty, VAT and excise duties and local income and wealth taxes.

Mutual administrative assistance

As well as the agreements stipulated, the OECD and Council of Europe Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (multilateral convention) is also applicable to these three dependencies. This multilateral convention is now in force in 68 countries and jurisdictions.

Spain is very active in the international arena in defence of the principles of transparency and exchange of information. In recent years, it has completed numerous international conventions and agreements to guarantee the exchange of information. Among the treaties to avoid double taxation that include an information exchange clause are the conventions in force with Canada, Uzbekistan, Oman, Nigeria, Senegal, the Dominican Republic, Cyprus, the United Kingdom and Argentina, as well as the conventions signed with Andorra, the United States and India and those initialled with Qatar and Austria. Among the information exchange agreements are those initialled with Monaco and Macao.

New information exchange standard

As well as the multilateral agreement and the bilateral conventions and agreements, Spain has helped drive the development of a new standard for automatic and standardised exchange of information on a global scale. To this end, in 2014 it signed in Berlin with 50 other countries and jurisdictions a multilateral agreement to make effective this automatic exchange of information. It has now been signed by 74 countries and jurisdictions, among them those of the three Dependencies of the British Crown that have undertaken, as in the case of Spain, to carry out the first automatic exchange of information in September 2017, using data from 2016.

At the same time, the Official State Gazette (Spanish acronym: BOE) published Royal Decree 1021/2015 of 13 November on Tuesday, which establishes the obligation to identify the tax residence of persons holding or controlling certain financial accounts and to provide information about them within the scope of mutual assistance. This Royal Decree incorporates into Spanish law the requirements on reporting to the Tax Agency, as required by the application of the multilateral agreement mentioned above and also by Directive 2014/107/EU.