Tax data to be shared with
foreign states in 2018

Automatic exchange of financial account
information to be handled by specialized agency

Lebanon has declared its commitment to the international standard of automatic exchange of financial account information, which aims to combat tax evasion and avoidance, according to a statement by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.

The move comes in implementation of the tax information exchange law that was approved by Parliament in 2015 and is part of the country’s commitment to international regulations, said Chahdan Jebeyli Group Head of the Legal and Compliance Department at Bank Audi Group.

The next step will be to create more awareness in the banking sector about this issue and set up the structure and mechanisms that will allow this decision to be implemented by 2018, he said.

The automatic exchange of information implies that data about foreign taxpayers that have local bank accounts is shared routinely and not just on demand, Jebeyli said. Data supplied by various banks will be collected by a government agency that will be in charge of providing this information to the foreign tax authorities, he said.

With Lebanon, the number of committed jurisdictions worldwide has reached 101.