05/09/2022 – After 15 years at the OECD, including 10 years as the Director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration (CTP), Pascal Saint-Amans will retire from the organisation at the end of October 2022.
While sad to see Pascal leave the Organisation, I respect his decision that this is the time for him to pursue other career opportunities.
I am very grateful to Pascal for the enormous, historically significant contribution he has made to international tax policy reform and administration through his work at the OECD.
In 2012, he launched the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project, delivering the 15-point action plan of BEPS measures to tackle tax avoidance within a record two-year period, including a new type of multilateral instrument that has since been signed onto by 99 jurisdictions.
As part of the BEPS Project, he brokered last year’s landmark agreement among 137 countries and jurisdictions on the two pillar solution to the tax challenges arising from the digitalisation and the globalisation of the economy.
He also led the establishment of automatic exchange of financial account information as a global standard in 2014, which is being implemented, in addition to exchange of information on request, by most of the 165 members of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information in Tax Matters, using the Common Transmission System also developed under his leadership.
Together with the United Nations Development Programme Pascal established the Tax Inspectors without Borders programme, designed to help developing countries build tax audit capacity. That programme has delivered impressive results: a total of USD 1.7 billion tax revenues has been collected and USD 3.9 billion in tax has been assessed through these assistance programmes across Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.
Building on his experience in establishing the Inclusive Framework on BEPS and CTP’s work on carbon pricing, he also played a key role in the establishment of the Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches, which we successfully launched at this year’s OECD Ministerial Council Meeting.
I am delighted to announce that Grace Perez-Navarro has agreed to take on the Director role at the Centre for Tax Policy from 1 November 2022 until 31 March 2023.
This will help us maintain our momentum on the implementation of our Two-Pillar international reform efforts at a critical time.
Grace is exceptionally well suited to this role, given her outstanding credentials and external reputation and her long-term role in leading the work of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration alongside Pascal. As Deputy Director of CTP since 2007, Grace has been centrally involved in all the important work of CTP, including the Two-Pillar negotiations and the recent establishment of the Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches.
Grace will be supported by two Acting Deputy Directors – David Bradbury and Achim Pross.
David has been the Head of the Tax Policy and Statistics Division since April 2014 and Achim has been the Head of the International Co-operation and Tax Administration Division since 2011.
Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to preserve individual liberty and improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.
