The members of the OECD Forum on Tax Administration (FTA) held its virtual plenary meeting last month bringing together tax commissioners from across the globe and representatives from international organisations and regional tax administration bodies. The FTA met to discuss a variety of tax administration issues including responses to the global pandemic, emerging risks, digital transformation and tax certainty.

The FTA members agreed the following:

• To improve the resilience and agility of tax administrations globally to respond to crises, including through collaboration on new ways of working, the development and use of new IT tools, and different working arrangements.
• To develop a roadmap in early 2021 for the digital service transformation of tax administrations building on the vision for Tax Administration 3.0 published at the Plenary. This roadmap will aim to identify priority work on core elements of this vision, such as digital identity, e-invoicing and secure mechanisms for the real-time sharing of information across borders.
• To ramp up work on tax certainty, including through moving the International Compliance Assurance Programme (ICAP) from a pilot phase to an established programme for the co-ordinated assessment of multinational enterprise groups’ transfer pricing risks.
• To bring together senior FTA leaders in the spring of 2021 to consider collective FTA support for capacity building in developing countries, in particular around the digitalisation and the further development of the joint OECD/UNDP Tax Inspectors Without Borders initiative.

Further information is available in the OECD’s update on their website.