Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will check that out for the Chairman.

I will now deal with the questions on BEPS. As the Chairman knows we are now reaching the finality and the BEPS reports are expected to be published in October. The BEPS action plan includes the development of measures to prevent the abuse of treaties. Some of these measures will involve changes to the OECD model convention on which Ireland's model is based, as the Chairman correctly states. This will have implications for Ireland negotiating position generally for future double taxation agreements. However, it has been said that changes agreed under BEPS would take over 20 years to permeate through to tax treaties worldwide. For this reason the action plan also provides for the development of a legal instrument to allow targeted BEPS measures to be incorporated into existing double taxation agreements, DTAs. Work on developing this multilateral instrument is expected to be concluded next year and the Department of Finance and the Office of the Revenue Commissioners are involved in this work. The new rule will apply to all future DTAs. There will be the development under the action plan of a multilateral instrument to apply certain actions to existing treaties and we are working on that currently.

The Bahamas is a Crown dependency, hence our ambassador to the United Kingdom signed the treaty.