President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih has decided to seek parliamentary consideration to join the ‘Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters’ and associated agreements; ‘Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information’ and the ‘Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on the Exchange of Country-By-Country Reports’. The Cabinet deliberated on a paper on the subject proposed by the Ministry of Finance at today’s virtual session, leading to the decision.

The Convention, developed jointly between the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Council of Europe, facilitates international co-operation for a better operation of national tax laws while respecting the fundamental rights of taxpayers. It provides for all possible forms of administrative co-operation between states in the assessment and collection of taxes. This co-operation ranges from the exchange of information, including automatic exchanges, to the recovery of foreign tax claims.

The countries signatory to the Convention must agree to adopt the multilateral competent authority agreements. The main aim of adopting the multilateral competent authority agreements is to create a mechanism for the exchange of information, enforcement of actions relating to tax transparency as a member of the global forum and to fulfil the commitment to exclude the Maldives from the European Union (EU) list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes. Subject to these terms, the Maldives looks forward to signing the convention before the end of April 2021.