Global financial institutions summit New York (2nd edition)

On December 7 and 8 the second edition of GFIS (the global financial institutions summit) took place in New York. The annual GFIS is part of the J5 organization (the Joint chiefs of global tax enforcement). From the Netherlands, the FIOD is part of the J5, together with the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. The objective of the J5 is to combat cross-border crime more effectively by working together on the themes: Crypto currency, Professional Enablers, Data & Platforms and now Public Private cooperation, supported by professional Communications.

The GFIS is part of the Public Private Cooperation working group. Two colleagues from the AMLC represent the FIOD in this. The GFIS aims to bring together public and private partners at a high executive level and to deepen knowledge based on global urgent themes, as well as to discuss and develop cross-border policy. Bringing together public (J5) and private partners (such as HSBC, UBS, Santander, ING, Citi Bank, as well as the national banking associations, for the Netherlands NVB) at this level in the area of tax crime is unique. At the same time, it also emphatically looks at collaborations that can provide potential added value to learn from, such as EFIPPP and national collaborations such as JMLIT (UK), and the FEC in the Netherlands.

The two-day Summit was dedicated to further developing the frameworks for collaborating in both public and public-private ways. To this end, a number of core themes were addressed: information sharing blockers, legislative and regulatory opportunities and tax crime priorities. From the FIOD, we worked on the last theme by sending all GFIS members a survey asking them which topics they considered important to tackle from the GFIS in using PPP and in what way this would be most effective. A top three was formulated which categorically is still quite abstract, but from the various responses can be well divided into more concrete approaches: offshore tax evasion (think professional enablers, offshore structures, UBO), tech enabled tax crime (NFT, cryptocurrency, bitcoin mixers), and transparency (corporate transparency, UBO register, but also information sharing (between public-public, public-private and private-private).

The ensuing discussion proved informative and relevant to determine further direction. At the same time, this gave the go-ahead for the further elaboration of the themes into concrete "workflows." This will continue in 2023. There will be an additional task for the FIOD, as the GFIS will be organized in the Netherlands at the end of 2023. This promises to be a great event where the GFIS participants can update each other on the progress of the work.