Chargé D’affaires of the Eastern Caribbean States, Sharlene Shillinford-McKlmon, is putting Anguilla and the rest of the Caribbean islands on notice to look out for what she said is a universal movement by the developed countries to help the Caribbean islands repair their domestic tax systems.
“…It is written in the Addis Ababa [Tax Initiative]. There are paragraphs that speak to this matter that the developed countries of the world…[are] to help the developing countries repair their domestic tax systems in order for them to generate more money to finance their own development – their meaning us,” she advised as she addressed journalists from Anguilla and the Caribbean who visited the ECS office during their brief study tour of the EU in Brussels.
“So keep that in your mind; when you see things that are happening. When you hear certain countries are (black) listed, go deeper. You can’t just say, oh my country got this because of so and so …, It’s not as simple as that. There is always something behind what you see,” Shillingford-Mcklom cautioned.
She went on:“Well how bad is the tax system? Are we already sharing information on the global level? Do we have automatic exchange of information? Most of us do. When I look at the document, we’re all signed up! Yet still we are receiving letters. Why? Because they want to help us make changes to our tax systems that will help us to generate more domestic resources. The more taxes we charge, the more money the government will gain to fund its own development and the less money the donor has to give us.”
Meanwhile in responding to a question posed on the issue of countries being black listed, Patrick I. Gomes, Secretary General for the African Caribbean Pacific countries, stated: “We first condemned the way in which the European Commission went about identifying what we call harmful tax jurisdiction – we’ve condemned that. We’ve had opened discussions and we’ve call for negotiations and consultations to remove countries – or to provide evidence why and they began to question how they went about it.”
He continued: “And therefore bilateral discussions have been facilitated where a single country is able to go to the country in Europe which says that they find the tax regulations are inadequate or have loopholes; and we’ve asked them therefore to discuss and point out what it is. So at the overall level, in the Joint Ministerial Trade Committee we had discussions with the Trade Commissioner – and therefore the European Commission has taken instructions that they would look through each of those countries which they put onto the list to remove from the list, and that is being corrected but is being corrected by discussion.”
When asked about the timeframe, he responded: “It’s ongoing. Immediate action is being taken to review and every meeting that we’ve had in the Joint Ministerial Committee we’ve always raised that and demanded if there is no evidence remove countries that you’ve put there.”
He said there was reputational damage for countries, especially Belize, that have been negatively impacted by the accusation being made about their tax systems.
Mr. Gomes stressed: “But let us be clear that tax avoidance and tax evasion in the way by which the accumulation of wealth is taken from our countries, to the benefit of others, has to be condemned wherever and has to find loopholes. But our financial services can be put under the pressure of excessive regulation [and this] is also to be rejected. We cannot accept that. We must accept what is reasonable for our countries to be able to do – small countries, small jurisdictions. How we can handle that? And that is why the engagement is ongoing with the data and the evidence that has to be put forward, and we question it.”
