Trinidad Removed from Harmful Tax Practices List

• The government of Trinidad and Tobago announced that the country has been removed from the list of nations identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as having harmful tax practices
• Finance Minister Colm Imbert confirmed that Port of Spain was officially delisted from this category in February 2025. This move reflects the country’s progress in aligning with international standards for tax transparency and regulatory compliance
• It joins Anguilla, Barbados, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands whose policies are deemed not harmful. The OECD’s Forum on Harmful Tax Practices (FHTP) has been conducting reviews of preferential tax regimes for the last 25 years to determine whether the regimes could be harmful to the tax base of other jurisdictions.
• Base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), where multinationals shift profits to low or no-tax locations where they have little or no economic activity or erode tax bases through deductible payments, such as interest or royalties, cost countries throughout the world billions in lost revenue annually.
• Imbert noted that BEPS practices undermine the fairness and integrity of tax systems because businesses that operate across borders can use them to gain a competitive advantage over enterprises operating at the domestic level. Imbert said in the new Special Economic Zones, a minimum global tax rate of 15 percent is imposed on multinationals operating in the country’s SEZs, in accordance with the BEPS standards.
• The Global Forum is a multilateral framework for tax transparency and information sharing, within which over 170 countries participate equally. The acknowledgement by the OECD that Trinidad and Tobago is no longer considered to have harmful tax practices is an important step in our journey towards full compliance with the Global Forum and the European Union.

(Source: Caribbean National Weekly)