A five-day mock assessment exercise conducted by the Global Forum secretariat kicked off on Monday in Kigali.
Officials are undertaking an on-site mission to Kigali until August 4 to evaluate the readiness of the legal and regulatory framework for implementing the Exchange of information on request standard (EOIR).
The EOIR Peer Review of Rwanda is scheduled to be launched between October 1 and December 31, 2023.
The Global Forum is a group of over 160 jurisdictions that includes all G20 countries, financial centres, and the majority of its members are developing countries.
Together they work on an equal footing to put an end to offshore tax evasion.
Finance Minister, Dr. Uzziel Ndagijimana graced the kick-off with his presence and said the excercise gives Rwanda an opportunity to show case progress.
“This mock assessment comes at a crucial moment, providing Rwanda with an opportunity to showcase the progress made towards improving tax transparency standards following the country’s recent tax reforms intended to broaden the tax base and improve compliance,” he said. 
The assessment is inline with international Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters (AEOI).
Rwanda, the ninth African country to do so, made a commitment in September 2021 to adhere to the standard.
Nearly three quarters (74%) of the Global Forum members are now committed to start automatic exchange.
The standard draws extensively on earlier work of the OECD in the area of automatic exchange of information.
It incorporates progress made within the European Union, as well as global anti-money laundering standards, with the intergovernmental implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) having acted as a catalyst for the move towards automatic exchange of information in a multilateral context.
The second edition expands the last part on the CRS XML Schema User Guide.
It contains additional technical guidance on the handling of corrections and cancellations within the CRS XML Schema, as well as a revised and expanded set of correction examples.
Note thay Rwanda was admitted to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Centre as its 55th member during the OECD Forum in Paris, France in May 2019.
Offials said then that this was a transformational development path, and the country’s commitment to sharing the lessons learned, and willingness to enhance cooperation with other member States, while accessing best practices of development from other OECD members.
During the kick-off yesterday, the Commissioner General of RRA, Pascal Ruganintwali, said that Rwanda will maintain ongoing communications with the Global Forum Secretariat to ensure the country achieves the compliant score for both Automatic Exchange of Information on financial accounts and EOIR standards.
