Rabat – Morocco remains “largely compliant” with international standards of transparency and exchange of information on request, according to a new publication from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Based on an evaluation of the regulatory and legal frameworks, OECD concluded that while Morocco remains largely compliant with international transparency standards, the country’s performance in sub-elements is widely different.
The international standards for transparency and information exchange reflect the extent to which a country is efficient in collecting taxes and enforcing tax-related regulations.
The OECD publication shows that Morocco has made significant strides in implementing the organization’s recommendations pertaining to tax regulations between 2016 and 2022.
Morocco’s compliance rate with the international standards of the availability of accounting information, and exchange of information on request went from “largely compliant” in 2016 to fully compliant in 2022.
However, the country’s performance in the sub-element relating to the quality and timeliness of responses was and remains only “partially compliant.”
Over the evaluation period, Morocco received 406 information requests from 16 partners. At the end of the evaluation period, 135 (almost a third of the requests) were still pending, and 29 requests dated back more than three years the document details.
Since 2016, Morocco implemented a number of multilateral conventions on the enforcement of tax regulations, the report explains. In the past two years, the country successfully introduced a sanction on non-compliance with the law dictating that accounting records and supporting documents should be kept for at least 10 years.
OECD summarizes its evaluation by stating that “Morocco has a legal framework that broadly ensures the availability of, access to, and effective exchange of relevant information for tax purposes, but this framework requires improvement in several areas, particularly in the exchange of information in practice.”
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