Barbados is supporting a push for the United Nations to help bring more “transparency and fairness” in international taxation.
However, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kerrie Symmonds said Government was adopting “a parallel course of action in order to avoid a pointless and unhelpful conflict between ourselves and more traditional international economic regulators” like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU).
This was because “the practical reality . . . is that international tax regimes are a specialty area, and the technical aspects of the necessary work and the relevant specialists are not as yet established as being well embodied and deployed in the UN system”.
Symmonds added: “Getting to that stage is going to be a time-consuming process. Meanwhile, in the interim, while the UN as a whole seeks to make progress on the issue, the political process of setting new rules has been pushed by the large industrial powers of the North Atlantic region especially.” (SC)
