New German government drops tax haven reporting requirements
The new German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble announced, on 7 January 2010, that he would not be seeking to impose new reporting requirements on taxpayers transferring money to jurisdictions that Germany had previously labeled as tax havens.
The position is a reversal from the previous administration, in which then-Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck pushed hard for legislation that empowered Berlin to take punitive steps against those jurisdictions. The resulting law, passed in September last year, requires taxpayers to document transactions with tax havens and submit the data to German tax officials. Failure to comply could lead to a revocation of privileges for companies, and heavy fines for individual taxpayers.
But the new Finance Ministry of CDU member Wolfgang Schaeuble issued a statement saying: "No state or area fulfilled the criteria for prohibitive measures suggested in the September tax evasion law. At this point, we see no reason to force taxpayers or banks to provide documentation of accounts." Schaeuble instead called on the OECD to enforce the standards with which jurisdictions have agreed to comply.
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