A New World Tax Regime

The New American – by Alex Newman

To anyone who even casually monitors international agencies — such as the UN, the OECD, and the IMF — it will come as no surprise that those agencies have long wanted stable sources of funding that they could count on, rather than relying on handouts from governments around the world. But it would likely come as a surprise to most that we will likely see the initial operation of a world tax regime to fund international entities by 2015.  

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — a 34-member (presently) international economic organization that works to influence world financial operations — openly announced plans to advance the longtime socialist-backed dream of a planetary taxation regime. The plans call for legitimate governments and dictatorships worldwide to share all private financial data on citizens. It is all openly inspired by, and modeled on, Obama’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) aimed at coercing banks and governments around the world into reporting all accounts and assets held by “U.S. persons” to the IRS. (Click here to see related FATCA article.)  And that, experts say, in conjunction with other related machinations, such as an emerging plan to force businesses to pay equally high corporate taxes in all jurisdictions of the world rather than setting up shop in lower-tax nations, will lay the foundation upon which to build a “World Tax Organization.”

In mid-February, in fact, the OECD officially unveiled its plan informally called GATCA (Global Account Tax Compliance Act) by analysts. Calling its ploy to put the final nail in the coffin for financial privacy “game changing,” the tax-funded OECD said it would require governments to collect massive amounts of sensitive personal information on individuals from banks and other financial institutions in their jurisdictions. “The reality will be that for the automatic exchange of information rules should cover what kind of information is to be exchanged, how often, who should collect the information, to whom it should be sent, and in what format,” claimed Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, speaking as if the plot were already a done deal.

 

 

Once gathered, the vast troves of private data would be automatically exchanged between all participating governments and dictatorships. “You collect the data, you put it in the pipe and it goes to the other party,” said Saint-Amans, who, as could probably be expected, pays no taxes on his bloated tax-funded salary.

Autocrats “R” Us

Over 40 governments, which the Paris-based OECD misleadingly refers to as “countries,” have already committed to the controversial scheme. In a “joint statement,” participating governments celebrated the planetary plot, implying that it was only being instituted to catch tax cheats. “Tax evasion is a global problem and requires a global solution,” said representatives from dozens of governments, including more than a few run by self-described socialists. “We therefore strongly support the development of the single global standard for automatic exchange of information between tax authorities.”

Also, sounding suspiciously like a threat, the participating governments claimed that only countries with rulers who submit to the draconian new regime will be able to “prosper in the future.” In other words, join the emerging global tax regime and violate the privacy rights of everyone, or suffer financial penalties. “We call on other countries and jurisdictions to commit to join this initiative at the earliest opportunity with the aim of rapidly creating a truly global system of automatic information exchange,” the governments continued in their joint statement.

The reality is that, using the information collected, a lot more will be done than catching tax cheats. Besides the worldwide violation of individuals’ financial privacy, the plan will provide the platform to implement a global taxing authority.

A coalition of governments and brutal dictatorships known as the Group of 20 (G-20) is in the process of building what virtually every major “mainstream” media outlet recently described as a “New World Order,” with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and UN at its center.

Besides publicly announcing its desire in recent years for shared financial data and more on all citizens, top officials in the coalition, which includes the ruthless communist regime ruling mainland China and the rest of the “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa), among other autocracies, have been brazenly calling for a new world currency and empowering the IMF to serve as a global central bank, as well as “harmonizing” tax policies and ending what the outfit refers to as “harmful tax competition.”

To implement the coalition’s plans, the G-20 powers asked the United Nations-linked OECD to take the lead. Finance bosses and central bankers for G-20 powers held a meeting in Australia in late February, where they touted the OECD’s radical plan, along with other key elements of the emerging global tax regime, and trumpeted its full implementation by next year. “We endorse the Common Reporting Standard for automatic exchange of tax information on a reciprocal basis and will work with all relevant parties, including our financial institutions, to detail our implementation plan at our September meeting,” the G-20 finance chiefs and central bank bosses said in their joint “communiqué” after the meeting.

“In parallel, we expect to begin to exchange information automatically on tax matters among G20 members by the end of 2015,” they added. “We call for the early adoption of the standard by those jurisdictions that are able to do so. We call on all financial centres to match our commitments. We urge all jurisdictions that have not yet complied with the existing standard for exchange of information on request to do so and sign the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters without further delay.” The communist regime in Beijing just joined last year.

The G-20 leaders endorsed another extreme OECD-linked plot to extract more wealth from companies that, while separate, fits nicely with the broader agenda. According to the statist radicals at the G-20 and OECD, the alleged “problem,” which they refer to as “Base Erosion and Profit Shifting,” or BEPS, involves firms trying to maximize value for customers and shareholders by keeping profits and economic activity in lower-tax jurisdictions as much as possible. For the OECD and the Big Government-mongers at the G-20, that must come to an end.

“We are committed to a global response to Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) based on sound tax policy principles,” the “communiqué” continued. “Profits should be taxed where economic activities deriving the profits are performed and where value is created. We continue our full support for the G20/OECD BEPS Action Plan, and look forward to progress as set out in the agreed timetable. By the Brisbane summit, we will start to deliver effective, practical and sustainable measures to counter BEPS across all industries, including traditional, digital and digitalised firms, in an increasingly globalized economy.”

Finally, the G-20 finance chiefs continued pushing to empower the IMF — doubling the resources it has while giving dictatorships such as China’s and other socialist regimes much more control over the institution at the expense of the U.S. government. While the Obama administration has been a fervent supporter of the dangerous plot, which moves the IMF closer to the establishment’s vision of an all-powerful monetary authority out of U.S. control, Congress has so far refused to go along with the scheme. For globalist G-20 bosses, though, it is the top priority.

“We deeply regret that the IMF quota and governance reforms agreed to in 2010 have not yet become effective and that the 15th General Review of Quotas was not completed by January 2014,” they said. “Our highest priority remains ratifying the 2010 reforms, and we urge the US to do so before our next meeting in April. In April, we will take stock of progress towards meeting this priority and completing the 15th General Review of Quotas by January 2015.” Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s regime and others have been threatening to simply go ahead with the reforms without U.S. government approval if Congress does not submit quickly.

Bodies Featured in Finance

The IMF and the UN are at the center of these global financial manipulations.

In recent years, of course, the United Nations has become increasingly bold in its efforts, seizing on every conceivable pretext to push the radical agenda for an independent revenue stream that would free it from having to depend on contributions from member governments and make it a true world power. Global “carbon” taxes, UN taxes on air travel, financial transaction taxes, taxes on maritime activity, billionaire taxes, and more have all been floated just in the last few years. In the Obama administration, which has been openly touting a corporate “global minimum tax,” the would-be planetary taxers may have found their best opportunity to move forward thus far.

In 2012, Rob Vos, director of the UN’s Development Policy and Analysis Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, was touting a proposed tax on the wealthy to raise some $400 billion per year. “Although donors must meet their commitments, it is time to look for other ways to find resources to finance development needs and address growing global challenges, such as combating climate change,” Vos claimed. “We are suggesting various ways to tap resources through international mechanisms, such as coordinated taxes on carbon emissions, air traffic, and financial and currency transactions.”

Also in 2012, UN Development Program Deputy Director Jens Wandel echoed previous UN calls for global taxes on finance. “One idea which we could consider is a minimal financial transaction tax (of .005 percent),” he claimed. “This will create $40 billion in revenue.” Separately, UN Commission for Social Development Chairman Jorge Valero claimed that “it is absolutely essential to establish controls on capital movements and financial speculation.” That regime, he added, would come about through “progressive policies of taxation” requiring “those who earn more to pay more taxes.”

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund, which as The New American has documented extensively is being groomed to take on the role of global central bank, is also now openly outlining plans for an unprecedented fleecing of humanity. A controversial IMF report released late last year, for instance, touts schemes to have big-spending governments with out-of-control debts plunder humanity’s wealth using a mix of much higher taxes and outright confiscation. (They have already literally looted the bank accounts of private individuals in Cyprus as a trial run at worldwide wealth confiscation.) The goal: Prop up Big Government. Because people and their assets are generally mobile, though, the radical document, dubbed Taxing Times, also proposes measures to prevent people from escaping the upcoming fleecing.

“The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a capital levy, a one-off tax on private wealth, as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability,” the IMF report claims, hiding behind the passive voice while citing previous rounds of wholesale looting to back up its claims. “The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible, and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair).”

Citing a sample of 15 euro-area nations, the report claims that all households with positive net wealth — anyone with more assets than debt, in essence — would have to surrender about 10 percent of it. Because many people who lived responsibly and saved would presumably try to avoid the looting of their wealth, however, drastic measures must be considered to stop them. “Substantial progress likely requires enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere,” the report says matter-of-factly. Companies are especially in the crosshairs.

The OECD’s global tax-information regime should do the trick.

Unsurprisingly, also pushing the schemes has been Socialist International, the premier alliance of socialist and communist political parties around the world. The powerful coalition, which met in South Africa in 2012, again called for global taxes, a planetary currency, and a global tax information-sharing regime in one of its resolutions.

“There is a pressing need to dismantle tax havens, close loopholes and create automatic tax record exchange systems,” claimed one of the resolutions adopted by the socialist outfit’s oftentimes brutal members. “Only under the auspices of a new Global Financial Architecture can this take place, one that significantly increases transparency and strengthens enforcement of the regulations.” The outfit also demanded international wealth redistribution from freer countries to socialist regimes impoverished by socialism.

The Socialist International has been calling for the “automatic exchange of information” scheme for years — for the first time, officially at least, in 2009, it seems. And now, thanks to Obama and his Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which is setting up the worldwide sharing of financial information, it may get its wish.

Considering the line-up pushing for a world taxing authority, and now the ability to gather all the information to put such an authority into place, is there any chance that the collection of financial data on a worldwide scale will not subsequently lead to a world taxing authority and world taxes? No.

So Much for Citizens’ Welfare

None of the proposed changes look likely to benefit the common man — only governments and their functionaries. For Americans such a scheme would turn American traditions and constitutional protections upside down. According to a brief by the OECD, among the data that governments would share with each other as part of the “automatic exchange of information” regime are various categories of income, changes of address, purchase or sale of property, and more. Instead of being secure in one’s house, papers, and effects without a warrant and probable cause, governments and autocrats around the world will be free to rifle through Americans’ most sensitive information at will.

Hackers, criminals, and identity thieves, among others, will almost certainly be able to access the data, dubious globalist promises of “security” notwithstanding. The situation is similar in other nations where authorities are busy gutting long-standing protections on privacy rights to comply with FATCA.

While Americans might recoil in horror at the prospect of sharing private financial information with Third World socialist regimes, the OECD boasts of its collaboration with them. “Working with partner countries (including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa), the OECD is advancing rapidly in the development of a common model for reporting and automatic exchange of certain account information held by financial institutions, including due diligence rules, reporting formats and secure transmission methods,” the outfit explained, noting that automatic information sharing between governments and even ruthless tyrannies was becoming “the new standard.”

The chance for abuse of individuals’ information is 100 percent. Consider that among the early participants in the scheme is the imploding socialist regime ruling Argentina — currently searching frantically for wealth to plunder as the economy it misrules collapses around it. Also on board is the radical South African Communist Party-African National Congress regime, which has been implicated in genocide in South Africa by the world’s leading expert in the field, and which has more poverty today than when power was transferred from the white government to the ANC. Eventually, globalists hope to force every government and dictator on the planet into participating. More than a few brutal autocracies are already lining up to join.

A senior OECD bureaucrat claimed that the Obama administration had also committed to “early adoption” of the new world tax plot, though experts and analysts have pointed out that the U.S. president has no lawful authority to follow through on such a pledge without approval from Congress. And with the IRS rampantly trying to hurt conservative organizations and the Justice Department refusing to do a thorough investigation of the lawbreaking, Americans cannot count on our government to work at safeguarding our data from abuse.

In addition to paying new world taxes, Americans will also get to pay to make it work. The plot to abolish financial privacy and national independence in tax policy will be expensive, although the taxpayer-funded bureaucrats at the OECD — whose salaries are not taxed — do not seem to care. “What we are doing is to develop a single standard that will be compatible with national and regional systems — there will be only one way of collecting and exchanging information,” said OECD tax czar Saint-Amans. “That will cost something, but it is the price to pay to be free from suspicion of complicity in fiscal fraud.”

The costs of implementing the new regime are expected to be staggering. Estimates vary, but potentially hundreds of billions will be required to implement the regime.

Top OECD leaders also admit that benefiting rulers, not those they rule, is the goal of the machinations. “We are happy to redouble our efforts in this area, working closely with interested countries [governments] and stakeholders to design global solutions to global problems to the benefit of governments and business around the world,” declared OECD boss Ángel Gurría, though it was not clear how having massive compliance costs and mandates foisted on companies would benefit them. The OECD boss, a former Mexican official with the Socialist International-aligned Revolutionary Institutional Party, was celebrating the exploitation of FATCA to create the global tax regime.

Among other concerns, opponents are also warning that the OECD and G-20 efforts would undermine global commerce and sovereignty by allowing high-tax regimes to tax business income earned in more business-friendly jurisdictions. It also represents an underhanded ploy to eliminate tax competition, which for centuries has served as perhaps the most crucial check on government power and abuses worldwide, contributing to better policies and lower taxes. After all, throughout history, if one ruler hiked taxes too much, or implemented ridiculous policies, labor, capital, and business could simply move to another jurisdiction.

“Ironically, OECD economists have written that the corporate income tax is the most destructive form of taxation,” explained Dan Mitchell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “Yet the bureaucracy is now pursuing a statist agenda that will penalize nations with relatively non-destructive business tax systems — such as Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands — to help prop up failing welfare states such as France.”

If countries with less restrictive tax regimes do not bow down to the OECD demands, they can be blacklisted as “uncooperative,” or worse, with economic sanctions being the implicit threat. The tactic is especially effective when bullying smaller nations — Switzerland and Hong Kong, for instance — particularly with Obama and bloated governments ruling major Western economies already fully on board with the agenda.

Where It Goes From Here

In an interview with SwissInfo.ch, OECD tax czar Saint-Amans portrayed his organ­ization — funded in large part by $100 million annually from U.S. taxpayers — as a global authority. “The beauty of international organizations is that we oversee relations between nations and the differences between states,” he boasted, though it was not clear where the OECD had any sort of mandate to “oversee” relations between governments.

With the unaccountable bureaucrats at globalist institutions almost always more than happy to trample individual rights and siphon more wealth out of the productive sector, little to no official opposition is expected to any of the ongoing plots to quietly erect, piece by piece, a global tax regime. Plus, powerful socialist forces and tax-funded “non-governmental organizations” are already working overtime to make sure the global tax regime and all that it entails can move forward.

Because the OECD, the G-20, and other forces seeking to foist the global FATCA, GATCA, and taxation regimes on the world are largely unaccountable to the public, stopping the scheme will be tough at this point.

If and when it goes into effect, governments all over the world will have instant access to people’s most sensitive financial records, including bank accounts, assets, income, insurance, interest paid, capital gains, property ownership, investments, sale of real estate, and more. And the age-old notion of innocent until proven guilty is being flipped on its head, with authorities searching through people’s highly personal information in search of potential crimes without warrants or even suspicion.

Escape will become virtually impossible for the poor, middle, and upper-middle classes. However, as multiple analysts have already pointed out, there will be more than enough loopholes in the new world taxation regime for the truly mega-wealthy members of the global establishment to protect their own wealth from outright confiscation. The rest of humanity, though, will suffer the consequences if the brakes are not slammed on the scheme very soon.

Historically, the U.S. government has largely resisted the OECD’s efforts to “harmonize” global taxation policy — at least tepidly. Under the Obama administration, however, the global plot has received among its biggest boosts thus far with the adoption of FATCA and the administration’s full-blown open support for all of the key globalist talking points — automatic information exchange, global minimum taxes, giving up sovereignty, global warming-related wealth redistribution, and more.

Critics of the machinations say the best methods of fighting back, for now at least, include raising awareness of what policymakers are doing and urging lawmakers to put an end to the lawless schemes. Stopping all funding to the OECD would be a good start, too, and an easy one if Congress would take action.

Now in public view, the pieces of the New World Tax regime are already falling into place. With firm resistance, though, the emerging planetary taxation regime can still be stopped — along with everything such a terrifying scheme would entail.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/17987-a-new-world-tax-regime