The Tax Justice Network (TJN) is once again publishing misleading and inaccurate information about the Cayman Islands and appears to be more focused on entertainment than reality. Its scoring skews results whereby successful financial centres are artificially pushed up the ranking.

The Cayman Islands would not be highly ranked on any secrecy index that is objective, transparent, and based on standards established by global standard setting bodies.

As stated by the OECD, “the key to international tax co-operation is effective exchange of information and the OECD has been at the forefront of international efforts to promote all forms of information exchange”. Accordingly, the OECD has developed the Global Forum which is a “key international body working on the implementation of international standards on tax transparency. It ensures that these high standards of transparency and exchange of information for tax purposes are in place around the world through its monitoring and peer review activities.”

The Cayman Islands actively participates in the OECD Global Forum and supports its collaborative development of global standards, monitoring, and peer review activities that best ensure the standards countries are being asked to follow are fair, objective, transparent, and fit for purpose in the real world.

The Cayman Islands, particularly its financial services industry, has been recognised for decades as a strong international partner in combatting corruption, money laundering, terrorism financing and tax evasion. Cayman has gained a reputation as a transparent, cooperative jurisdiction by meeting or exceeding globally accepted standards for transparency and cross border cooperation with law enforcement.

The Financial Secrecy Index purports to rank each country based on “how intensely the country’s legal and financial system allows wealthy individuals and criminals to hide and launder money extracted from around the world”. But the report goes on to state that a “higher rank on the index does not necessarily mean a jurisdiction is more secretive”. That would mean that it is a Financial Secrecy Index with rankings that are not based on secrecy.

In fact, TJN disregards recognised global standards and global standard setters, as well as the facts about a jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands and instead uses their own, home-made “methodology” seemingly to target pre-selected jurisdictions. TJN purposefully uses outdated, inaccurate and irrelevant information to manipulate the results of its report.

 The TJN FSI 2020 is so misleading and inaccurate regarding jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands that organisations should question its validity as a reliable resource to guide their decision-making.