Tunde Fowler, Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service of Nigeria, Thursday, August 17, signed two major multilateral agreements at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The agreement; Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (the MLI) and the CRS Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (the CRS MCAA), were signed before Ben Dickinson, Head of Global Relations & Development Division of OECD, at the organisation’s Headquarters in Paris.
According to OECD official website, Nigeria is the 94th country to join the CRS MCAA and the 71st jurisdiction to sign the MLI. The MLI, a legal instrument designed to prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) by multinational enterprises, allows Nigeria and other jurisdictions to transpose results from the OECD/G20 BEPS Project, including minimum standards to implement in tax treaties to prevent treaty abuse and “treaty shopping”, into their existing networks of bilateral tax treaties in a quick and efficient manner.
The other instrument signed, CRS MCAA is a multilateral competent authority agreement, based on Article 6 of the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.
It aims to implement the automatic exchange of financial account information pursuant to the OECD/G20 Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and to deliver the automatic exchange of CRS information between 101 jurisdictions by 2018. .
The signatories and parties to the Multilateral Convention to implement tax treaty related measures to prevent BEPS are 71 countries of the world, while countries like Cote d’Ivoire, Estonia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Panama and Tunisia have expressed their intent to sign.
Recently, JTB, Tunde Fowler announced in Abuja during the 138th meeting of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and Joint Tax Board (JTB) that Nigeria Federal Government has decided to go head-on with tax defaulters, especially among high-income earners, and in that regards, 12 states signed a memorandum of Understanding with the FG under the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS).
