In a major development in the fight against black money, multilateral grouping OECD today unveiled a 'single global standard' for automatic exchange of financial account information by various countries including India and Switzerland.

The new framework, to be presented before a meeting of G-20 finance ministers in September, would mark a significant forward movement from the current practice of information exchange mostly on the basis of requests and only in the cases of suspected tax evasion or other financial crimes.

The new global standard, which would be common for all countries, would facilitate a "systematic and periodic transmission of bulk taxpayer information by the source country of income to the country of residence of the taxpayer concerning various categories of income or asset information".

To enable automatic exchange of information on an annual basis, the financial institutions, including banks, brokers and fund houses, would have to mandatorily collect necessary details from their clients and submit the same to their respective regulators.

Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that such an automatic exchange of information would "help detect cases of non-compliance even where tax administrations have had no previous indications of non-compliance", besides providing timely information on non-compliance where tax has been evaded.

This assumes significance in case of India, as it has been facing difficulties in getting information on cases of suspected tax evasion from other countries, specially Switzerland, which has been maintaining that such details can not be shared without specific proof of financial irregularities by the concerned Indian client of Swiss banks.

An initial framework was released by OECD in this regard earlier this year and India became one of the 'early adopters' of this global convention.

Later, Switzerland also committed to abide by this framework, while a few more countries have now expressed their interest in adopting the same and these include Mauritius - another country with which India has been working on a revised bilateral treaty due to concerns of money laundering.

Those having already committed to follow this global protocol include the US, the UK, Germany, European Union, Japan, Singapore, China, as also financial centres like Luxembourg, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Bermuda, Isle of Man, Greece and Liechtenstein.

However, such an exchange of information would also have a confidentiality clause and safeguards, while countries would need to pass domestic laws as per their respective legal jurisdictions to enable such a cooperation.

The report says in the section about the United States:

The United States’ top organisational innovation was the use of student assessments for monitoring progress over time. Between 2000 and 2009, the United States saw a 24% point difference in the percentage of 15-year-old students in schools where assessments are used for monitoring progress from year-to-year; as of 2009, over 97% of all American secondary students were enrolled in schools using this practice.

Here are the top five U.S. “innovations in organizational practice and policy”:

1) More use of student assessments for monitoring school progress

2) More use of assessments for national or district benchmarking

3) More use of assessment data to inform parents of student progress

4) More external evaluation of secondary school classrooms

5) More parental service on secondary school committees

And here are the top five U.S. “innovations in pedagogic practice”:

1) More observation and description in secondary school science lessons

2) More individualized reading instruction in primary school classrooms

3) More use of answer explanation in primary mathematics

4) More relating of primary school lessons to everyday life

5) More text interpretation in primary lessons

Note that none of these mention the use of technology or computers.

How do the U.S. “innovations” compare to other countries and school systems included in the report? You can see for yourself here, but as an example, the top innovation in organizational practice and policy in Hong Kong was “more peer evaluation of teachers in primary and secondary education.” In Korea, the innovation in organizational practice and policy was “more peer evaluation of teachers in secondary education.” In Singapore, it was “more use of incentives for secondary teachers.”

The United States at this point appears to be standing alone in its obsessive use of standardized tests as important measures of accountability in education.

Incidentally, the school system that has come out on top in the last two administrations of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment  (PISA) is Shanghai, and Shanghai is considered dropping out of PISA. Why? Shanghai officials want to de-emphasize standardized test scores.