India and Switzerland have agreed to move towards an early agreement for the implementation of Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) between the two countries.
This emerged at a meeting between Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia and visiting Switzerland State Secretary for International Financial Matters Jacques de Watterville.
This is seen as a follow up to the discussions that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had with Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann at Geneva on June 6.
Both leaders had at their Geneva meeting discussed the need for expeditious exchange of information for combating tax evasion together with an early start to negotiations on the Agreement for Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI).
At today’s meeting, it was decided that experts of both the countries will meet before mid-September to further discuss the modalities for the reciprocal bilateral implementation of AEOI between India and Switzerland with a view to reaching an agreement at the earliest, possibly by the end of the year.
Once this agreement is signed, it will be possible for India to receive from 2018 financial information of accounts held by Indian residents in Switzerland on automatic basis.
Noting the progress in bilateral tax cooperation since the last Secretary-level meeting in October 2014, the two Secretaries encouraged the competent authorities of both the countries to continue with regular bilateral meetings and contacts to further enhance the cooperation.
The issue of requests based on “stolen data” figured prominently in the talks and Revenue Secretary welcomed the decision of the Swiss Federal Council to amend the Tax Administrative Assistance Act in accordance with the OECD standard and provide administrative assistance in requests based on data obtained in breach of Swiss law.
This is particularly significant in view of the recent challenges posed by the Panama Papers where voluminous information on offshore accounts has been placed in the public domain. The amended proposal is now with the Swiss Parliament. An early revision of the Swiss law in respect of stolen data would take the Indo-Swiss tax cooperation to a new level.