OECD publishes new beneficial ownership treatise

Chris Hamblin

20 March 2019

The organisation refers to the tract, somewhat bizarrely, as the "first ever beneficial ownership toolkit." The Secretariat of the OECD’s Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes prepared it in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank. The idea is to help governments impose the Global Forum’s standards, the better to give tax authorities and prosecutors access to reliable information about the ultimate beneficial owners of companies and other legal entities.

The so-called toolkit covers a variety of important issues regarding beneficial ownership, including:

the concepts of beneficial owners and ownership and the criteria used to identify them;
technical aspects of beneficial ownership rules, distinctions between legal persons and legal arrangements (such as trusts) and measures that the great powers are taking on the world stage to make information about beneficial ownership available to the authorities of all nations; and
ideas about Global Forum peer reviews.