Quote of the day - automatic information exchange

From Belgium's State Secretary for the Fight against Fraud, John Crombez:

"The era of exchange of information on demand as the international standard seems to be definitely over and is being replaced by automatic exchange of information."

It's not the political force of the statement that's significant, so much as the analysis: even a year or two ago, almost nobody on the international scene would have been prepared to say such a thing. They would have chained themselves to the OECD's hopelessly inadequate "on request" system of information exchange, trotting out the line that it is 'the internationally agreed standard.'

Progress comes, sometimes, faster than one might imagine.

The times, they are a'changin'. Which, as it happens, is the title of Crombez' speech. It makes interesting reading too. Among other things:

"The EU and the US economies account together for about half the entire world GDP. They can become a bipolar heart of a worldwide automatic exchange of information network."