EU Mulls Asking for Beneficial Owner Register Access in Tax Push

The European Union is considering adding to its tax haven blacklist jurisdictions that don’t give the bloc’s tax authorities access to their beneficial ownership registers, an EU official said Tuesday.

Under OECD international tax information exchange standards, EU tax authorities can ask other jurisdictions for beneficial ownership information on a case-by-case basis, but “there are a lot of unknown unknowns,” and “most of the time we’re not even aware there is something,” said Benjamin Angel, director of direct taxation in the European Commission, the EU’s executive.

EU tax authorities might start to ask jurisdictions for lists of names of EU ...