During 2013, with 122 jurisdictions having committed to the international standard of transparency and exchange of information (EOI) on request, political interest focused on the opportunities provided by automatic EOI.
On 19 April 2013 the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors endorsed automatic EOI as the expected new standard. The G20 decision followed earlier announcements by a number of European countries of their intention to develop and pilot multilateral tax information exchange. This was to be based on the 'Model Intergovernmental Agreement to Improve International Tax Compliance and to Implement FATCA', developed between these countries and the United States.
Fighting tax evasion was also high on the G8 agenda. On 22 May 2013, the European Union (EU) Council unanimously agreed to give priority to efforts to extend automatic EOI at the EU and global level and welcomed the ongoing efforts made in the G8, G20 and OECD to develop a global standard.
Because of these initiatives, the international community has quickly adopted cross-border cooperation and automatic EOI as minimum expectations in a post-FATCA anti-evasion environment.
In response, the OECD accelerated its work on developing a secure, effective and standardised model for automatic exchange for financial account information.
On 21 July 2014, the OECD released the full version of a global standard for automatic EOI between jurisdictions.