Yes, Full Fact disputes the claim.
And then confirms it in the final paragraph:
Full Fact wrote:It’s also possible Mr Christian was referring to another EU policy coming into force next January: the fifth anti-money laundering directive. This will require member states to put mechanisms in place to identify ownership information on bank and payment accounts and safe-deposits. The EU told us that this does not cover bank accounts held outside the EU.
Which corresponds with what I said:
KlaxonCow wrote:this will scupper many tax evasion / tax avoidance schemes within the EU, as inter-EU transfers of cash become nicely traceable by law.
I mean, it's no "silver bullet" for this kind of thing, as you can route your cash outside the EU and what-not.
But it'll make life more awkward
Now, if "Full Fact" is disputing Terry Christian's exact wording that anyone who has an offshore bank account will have to “come clean so we can see how much they are hiding” then, okay, that's bollocks, in the sense that, no, there is no compulsion to demonstrate "how much you're hiding".
But, for fuck's sake, we're talking about Terry Christian. On Twitter. A bloke who doesn't even capitalise his own name on Twitter.
Why would you remotely be expecting pedantic legal accuracy?
As I was saying, it introduces traceability - via ownership information - by law, within the EU, and what a lot of these tax avoidance schemes involve is bouncing cash around from country to country to country, to effectively "lose" this ownership information, so that money can get from one place to another, having dodged scrutiny and all the various tax authorities.
And, as I said, this is no "silver bullet". EU law only has jurisdiction within the EU. There will still be plenty of ways, I'm sure, to bounce your money outside the EU and back again.
(That said, it's worth noting that the US has also made moves towards increased traceability too. I know someone who runs their own small business and the bank has been recently harassing them to provide and double-check ownership details and the like. This is on the back of US laws that have moved in the same direction and the banks have to comply if they want to keep doing business in the US. The interesting thing about this is that the bank's asking details of a UK account for the sake of complying with a US law.)
Traceability
is the mechanism here. Because then the tax authorities can follow cash that's being bounced from country to country - following the chain of account ownership - to work out exactly who is transferring money to who.
That's the point.
Although, yes, fuck knows what Terry Christian is rambling on about on Twitter. And, no, as I covered, it's no "silver bullet" for tax evasion / avoidance / organised crime but it's a step in the right direction that every account and safe deposit has to have verified ownership information on it, so you know who's giving the money and who's receiving it. Follow the chain and you're following the money.
It's kind of like eavesdropping on DNS queries. Sure, you might not know what data is being transferred when they get to a particular website, but you do know which websites they're looking up in the DNS. It's the "meta data" of transactions. To look for and spot those dodgy "bounce" transactions back and forth, and because they know who owns these accounts, they can use their already existing powers to force a tax audit on that person, as they now have that "reasonable cause" to be suspicious.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
