Pascal Saint-Amans of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development caused amusement at the recent Jersey Finance conference in London when he expressed the OECD’s desire to “level the playing field” and “give an equal opportunity” to all jurisdictions, great and small.

The French former civil servant and director of the OECD's centre for tax policy and adminitration told the audience: "What is shaping the Swiss, but if they'd moved earlier, we wouldn't have had FATCA. I think that the next two years will be about helping new jurisdictions meet their obligations. The more transparent the world gets, the more we have to pay attention to confidentiality,” he said.

In Saint-Amans' lexicon, “transparency” presumably refers to one government giving information about people's bank accounts to their home governments and “confidentiality” means nobody doing so: a paradox.

In view of the arguably Orwellian habits of OECD communications, however, he might have been changing the use of “confidential”.  He might, perhaps, have been referring to the idea that the receiving tax authority should keep the information away from only some people, for example the general public, while officials of all kinds are free to pore over it.

A paper from 2012 on the subject of article 26 of the OECD tax convention (to which Saint-Amans referred) suggests this obscurely, although it never actually says whether it really thinks “confidentiality” is different from preserving the privacy of people's information from governments: "Law enforcement agencies and judicial authorities receiving information under the last sentence of paragraph two must treat that information as confidential consistent with the principles of paragraph two."

Since the officials are reading it already, it is not confidential from them and logically this suggests that, in the eyes of the OECD, information about people can remain “confidential” even at a moment when many officials are looking at it.

Saint-Amans said that when a high net worth resident of one country gives his personal information to the government of that country, which then passes it on to his home government, he wants it to "stay in the right hands”. Some mirth was heard in the audience as people recollected the malodorous reputation that Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs has for losing laptops containing data on millions of taxpayers on multiple occasions.

The Frenchman, however, seemed to have countries other than the UK on his mind: "Can you do an automatic exchange of information with all the countries? No, you cannot. You need a mechanism to check countries out. The ones that need automatic exchange the most are corrupt developing countries." He thought that the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes would do something about this eventually.

More levity bubbled to the surface when Saint-Amans turned to another OECD bugbear: "The second challenge is about US Delaware. It is the elephant outside the room...and inside the room! should not be allowed to get any benefit from that. You must implement your commitment, otherwise the rest of the world will not be happy. We're working on defensive measures against those who are not implementing the standards. My secretary-general, Angel Gurria, fought to have one standard, one system; the EU wanted its own," he said.

On the subject of base erosion and profit-shifting or BEPS, Saint-Amans said the old, existing double-tax-treaty system was bad because the rules were so good at rubbing out double taxation that they facilitated 'double non-taxation'. He told the audience, composed of trustees and other wealth experts mainly from Jersey and the UK, that the negotiations were "at crunch time" and that things were taking shape. He also encouraged everyone to have their say, as several discussion drafts were still open for public discussion. He reassured prospective commentators that his office always reads every comment. The timetable for BEPS is a two-year one.