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JS-1018Today Treasury Secretary Snow signed a new agreement with the Kingdom of the Netherlands that will allow for exchange of information on tax matters between the United States and Aruba. The agreement was signed by Treasury Secretary John Snow and Prime Minister Nelson Oduber of Aruba.
At the signing ceremony, Treasury Secretary Snow delivered the following remarks:
I would like to thank you all for being here today and welcome our friends from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, particularly Prime Minister Oduber of Aruba and Aruba’s Minister of Finance Nilo J.J. Swaen.
The United States and Aruba have developed a close and cooperative relationship on law enforcement matters. We greatly value this cooperation, particularly now as we continue to work to ensure that no safe haven exists anywhere in the world for the funds associated with illicit activities, including terrorism, money laundering, and tax evasion.
We have an obligation to enforce our tax laws, because failing to do so undermines the confidence of honest taxpayers in the fairness of the U.S. tax system. Access to needed information is vital to our efforts to ensure full and fair enforcement of our civil and criminal laws.
This new tax information exchange agreement is an important development. I want to thank Prime Minister Oduber for his participation in this signing ceremony and for demonstrating that Aruba and the United States share the common goals of upholding international standards and ensuring that our financial institutions are not used to further illicit activities of any kind.
This new tax information exchange agreement we are signing today is the ninth such agreement the United States has signed with a significant financial center in the last two years. It is the first such agreement that I will have the privilege to sign, and I do not intend for it to be the last. I hope that Aruba's cooperation with the United States will serve as an example to other financial centers in the region and around the world.
We will continue to work vigorously to extend our network of exchange of information agreements to cover additional financial centers throughout the world and to improve our existing information exchange relationships.”
Background Information
In the last two years, the United States has negotiated and concluded important new tax information agreements with eight significant offshore financial centers: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, and the Netherlands Antilles. Each of these agreements reflects the international standards for tax information exchange that the United States has been a leader in establishing.
In January 2003, the United States entered into a Mutual Agreement with Switzerland under the current U.S.-Swiss Income Tax Convention that is intended to facilitate more effective tax information exchange between the two countries. At the same time, the two governments agreed that more must be done to bring the U.S.-Swiss tax information exchange relationship up to international standards.
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