Aug 2018 Charity & NFP Law Update
International Tax Crime Alliance Formed: Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement
On July 3, 2018, the CRA announced that tax enforcement authorities from Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States have united to combat international tax crime and money laundering. The joint operational group was established as the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (“J5”) and was formed in response to a call to action from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in November 2017 to increase effectiveness in dealing with tax crimes. This call to action sets out ten global principles to effectively fight tax crime and recommends collaboration to create a strategy to address cross-border tax crimes.
The J5 is represented by heads of tax crime and senior officials from the CRA, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Australian Taxation Office, the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs from the United Kingdom and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation from the United States. Each member of the J5 has also committed one full-time resource to the group and may increase this number depending on the specific projects that are implemented.
Accordingly, the J5 is focused on strengthening their capacity to enforce tax and money laundering laws and will do so by sharing data, technology, implementing new approaches in enforcement and conducting joint operations. The group had their first meeting at the end of June 2018 along with leading experts from each of the members’ countries to develop strategies in relation to the enforcement against cybercrime and transnational tax crime. While the J5 has no specific focus on tax crimes and money laundering via the charitable and not-for-profit sector, its findings may have a future impact on Canadian charities and not-for-profits, particularly if they result in increased data sharing and new enforcement procedures in Canada.