The United States, Britain, Canada and Australia are setting up a new international taskforce to fight tax avoidance which may be up and running by the summer, UK government sources said on Friday.
Senior tax officials from the four countries have been meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, as finance ministers gather in Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington this week.
The officials have agreed at an operational level to set up the new body in New York and ministers will formally announce it next week. It will be staffed with anti-tax avoidance officials from all four countries and the United States will be providing the bulk of the administrative back-up.
The taskforce will create a web-based information portal, which can keep a real-time tab on avoidance schemes and shell companies.
"It's a Christmas list" of anti-tax dodge plans, said one UK official involved with the talks. "Most importantly this will massively enhance our radar capability for identifying new schemes."
The body's four main priorities will be to identify tax dodges and the firms that provide them; to share expertise, techniques and best practices; to enable collective action across international boundaries; and to look at industry developments to anticipate emerging problems.
Britain is believed to hold the most expertise at identifying and uncovering avoidance schemes, particularly on value-added tax, which has become a big issue recently for Australia, which imposed a sales tax only in 2000.
The United States, meanwhile, is the acknowledged expert on corporate and income tax avoidance and offshore tax shelters and is the pioneer of the disclosure regime.
"If the industry in the UK thinks we're getting tough, they should try their luck out here. The Americans are incredibly serious about this. We can learn a lot from them but we've got a lot of practical experience to share as well," the UK official said.
Officials said once the taskforce was up and running, they hoped to market it to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and they were also keen to get the French involved.
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