The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and India are to enter a three-year partnership aiming to strengthen tax cooperation and provide greater opportunities for structured dialogue and information sharing.

The three-year programme will aim to broaden existing technical cooperation on tax matters and to extend high-level policy dialogue between India, other emerging countries and the OECD, according to a statement from the Paris-headquartered body.

The body also said it will deepen India’s work within the OECD Committee on fiscal affairs and its subsidiary bodies, toward the eventual goal of becoming a full participant in the committee.

Over the next three years the programme will cover such issues as improving tax administration, adapting transfer pricing and tax treaty rules to the new international environment and better understanding the links between illicit flows and tax evasion.

The partnership will also enable India to contribute to OECD work on tax and inequality, on the application of VAT/GST to cross-border services and on aggressive tax planning and harmful tax practices.

“The phenomenal economic advances India has made in recent years and its growing integration into the global economy have exposed its tax policies to the same challenges facing the industrialised countries, notably how to adapt its domestic tax system and its international tax policies to a borderless economy, and how to ensure that the approaches embraced today will be well-suited to meet tomorrow’s needs,” said OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría.

“Deepening the relationship between the OECD and India will allow us to offer Indian officials what we have always offered our member countries:  a forum for sharing experiences and expertise, for benchmarking national policies against best practices and jointly identifying solutions to commonly shared problems.  This high-level policy dialogue is the natural continuation of the cooperation that has grown up between India and the OECD over the past decade, and should demonstrate that we all have much to learn from each other,” said Gurría.