OECD Urged to Keep Real Estate Data Reporting Project Simple

An OECD project underway now will be able to help countries uncover foreign real estate holdings meant to evade taxes, but only if it’s user-friendly and ensures privacy, researchers and tax professionals say.

Current data and infrastructure in many nations may be insufficient to enable a robust property-ownership information network, they say, and processes to set it up may be complicated and costly.

“There’s a general perception that you end up spending a lot of money on setting up expensive systems, but don’t end up getting much usable data and then translating that into tax collection,” said Abdul Muheet Chowdhary, ...