The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is holding its 17th Annual Plenary Meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (Global Forum) which started on 26 November 2024 in Asunción, Paraguay.

The OECD released various reports, notably  the 2024 Update on peer reviews of the automatic exchange of financial account information and the 2024 Annual Report, which outlined the Global Forum’s activities throughout the year.

The plenary meeting will be the occasion to highlight the collective achievements of the Global Forum and its 171 members.

A news release available on the OECD website recognises the results of 15 years of international co-operation to address tax evasion will drive discussions on the future work of the Global Forum, including on the implementation of the new Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), the latest advances on the automatic exchange of financial account information, the exchange of information on request, and the ever-expending capacity-building activities of the Global Forum Secretariat, to ensure the effective implementation of the international standards on transparency and exchange of information for tax purposes.

The Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (Global Forum) is a multilateral framework for tax transparency and information sharing, within which over 170 jurisdictions participate on an equal footing. The Global Forum monitors and peer reviews the implementation of the international standards of Exchange of Information on Request (EOIR) and Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI).

The standard on AEOI of financial accounts provides for the automatic exchange of a predefined set of financial account information between tax authorities on an annual basis to assist them in ensuring the correct amount of tax is paid. To ensure it is fully effective, the Global Forum carries out a review of each jurisdiction’s domestic and international legal frameworks to ensure they are complete, as well as a review of the effectiveness of their implementation of the standard in practice.

The report presents the latest conclusions of the peer reviews of the legal frameworks put in place by jurisdictions. It supplements the legal framework assessments and initial reviews of the effectiveness of their implementation in practice published in 2022 and 2023 for over 100 jurisdictions that were first to commit to commence AEOI. It also contains the results of the initial peer reviews on the effectiveness in practice of the implementation of the standard by jurisdictions commencing exchanges in 2020.