Panama will stay on EU’S Dirty Dozen tax haven black list

The European Union (EU) will keep Panama on its discriminatory list of tax havens for another six months as the country has not complied with international criteria on transparency and exchange of tax information, and for having a system of exemption of income from abroad considered harmful.

Panama,  has committed to comply with the recommendations of the framework against the erosion of the tax base of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with regard to country-by-country declarations by multinationals in time for the fall 2023 review.

American Samoa, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, the US Virgin Islands, Vanuatu, Anguilla, the Bahamas and the Turks Islands make up the list of 12 jurisdictions that do not cooperate in tax matters.

The list includes jurisdictions from around the world that have not engaged in a constructive dialogue with the EU on tax governance or have failed to meet their commitments to implement the necessary reforms to meet a set of objective criteria of good tax governance.

InclusionPanama was included in the first version of the “black” list of tax havens published in 2017 as a result of the lack of understanding of the country’s tax regimes, but during 2018 it became “grey” and managed to get out after the EU recognized that the Panamanian State was dedicated to completing the necessary legislative reforms to adapt the preferential regimes considered pernicious. Subsequently, in February 2020, the EU included it again, considering that the country had not yet complied with “the fiscal reforms to which it had committed” with the 27.

Its permanence on the list continued in 2021 to date.

The Government has argued that all the recommended measures given by the OECD to improve fiscal transparency have been applied.

The EU says it cannot remove Panama from the  blacklist “if first” the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) does not do so.