Tax Avoidance: British Overseas Territories

The inhabited Overseas Territories (OTs) are largely self-governing jurisdictions with democratically elected governments. In many OTs, responsibility for fiscal matters is devolved, including the determination of tax rates in line with international standards.

The Crown Dependencies (CDs) and all OTs with financial centres have committed to upholding international tax standards, including the tax transparency framework and the BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) Framework.

HMRC can access relevant information from the OTs, through both the automatic exchange of information (AEOI), and exchange on request, for tax investigations.

The Government has announced a record package to close the tax gap, including a commitment to grow HMRC’s compliance workforce by 5,500 people over the next five years. The Government has also published its approach to tacking offshore tax non-compliance, and announced an increase in HMRC’s resource assigned to tackling wealthy offshore non-compliance by around 400 people.

Accessible registers of beneficial ownership provide support in tackling illicit finance and corruption, and in exposing tax and sanctions evasion. The OTs have already made commitments to establish accessible registers. It remains our expectation that the CDs and OTs will ultimately implement fully public registers.