World leaders at yesterday’s G20 summit agreed to take action against uncooperative tax havens and backed plans for global accounting rules.

A G20 communique announced an agreement to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens, proclaiming that the ‘era of banking secrecy is over.’Yesterday the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development put Costa Rica, Malaysia, the Philippines and Uruguay on its blacklist of non-cooperative tax havens, as part of an international crackdown on tax evasion.

A separate ‘grey list’ of countries that have agreed to improve transparency standards but have not yet signed the necessary international accords included Liechtenstein, Monaco and Switzerland, the OECD said.

The G20 summit also announced a new Financial Stability Board (FSB), including all G20 countries, Spain, and the European Commission. The FSB
Will work with the International Monetary Fund to provide ‘early warnings of macroeconomic and financial risks and the actions needed to address them,’ the communique said.

The communique also expressed support for global accounting standards, urging
accounting standard setters to ‘work urgently with supervisors and regulators to improve standards on valuation and provisioning and achieve a single set of high-quality global accounting standards.’