May 18, 2016
Panama has officially signed on to comply with OECD standards on exchanging tax information, a move that comes more than a month after the Panama Papers data leak.
OECD officials say they have long tried to get Panama to agree to their common reporting standards on exchanging tax information, to no avail. However Panama’s Foreign Ministry announced on Tuesday that the country had inked its adhesion to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s reporting standards. Foreign Minister Luis Miguel Hincapie delivered the document to OECD headquarters in Paris. The new membership however does not take practical effect until 2018. The public gained its first access to the Panama Papers records of over 200,000 secret offshore companies when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) put a searchable database online in May.