As the British Virgin Islands (BVI) continue to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Irma, attention is properly focused on humanitarian relief and the repair of the BVI’s physical infrastructure. But there have also been important recent developments associated with the BVI’s legal infrastructure—changes designed to address the BVI’s reputation as one of the world’s premier tax havens, and as a popular destination for money laundered by corrupt public officials, organized crime networks, and others.

Thanks in part by a campaign by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron to remove the “cloak of secrecy” from Britain’s offshore territories, and in part to the embarrassing publication of the Panama Papers, the BVI recently enacted a new Beneficial Ownership Secure Search System (BOSS) Act, which went into effect last June.

The BOSS Act is the latest in a series of steps designed to clean up the BVI’s image. Previous moves have included signing an intergovernmental agreement with the United States on Foreign Account Tax Compliance and becoming a signatory to the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard for the automatic exchange of tax and financial information. In 2016, the BVI changed the law to make it mandatory – for the first time – for companies to report their lists of directors to the government. Overall, it’s not yet clear whether these moves have had any effect on the island’s offshore economy. Indeed, the BVI’s interest in preserving its status as a center of the world’s offshore economy has prevented more drastic steps and weakened those that have been taken. (The 2016 law changes, for instance, did not require the reporting of ownership stakes.) Half-measures are unsurprising given the centrality of secrecy to the BVI’s economic success – after all, you can’t expect turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving. While the BVI points out in its defense that its level of transparency is no worse than that of other UK offshore territories, and is in fact better than that of some US states, the fact remains that most of the BVI’s legal reforms have weighed business interests in secrecy more heavily than public interests in transparency.

The BOSS Act unfortunately seems to suffer from the same problem, though it is a step in the right direction. Continue reading →