Beneficial ownership gaps hold the Maldives back in global tax transparency review

The Maldives has landed one step below the top grade in an international assessment of tax transparency, with gaps in its rules on who ultimately owns companies the chief concern. The OECD released the peer review on 3 November 2026; it gives the country an overall rating of Largely Compliant against the standard for exchanging tax information on request.

The assessment was carried out by the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, whose scale runs from Non-Compliant through Partially Compliant and Largely Compliant up to Compliant. The standard asks three questions: whether ownership, accounting and banking records are maintained, whether the tax authority can get hold of them, and whether they can be handed to partner jurisdictions when requested.

Ratings by element

• Six of the 10 elements were rated Compliant: confidentiality; taxpayer rights and safeguards; the tax authority's power to obtain information; notification rights and appeal procedures; the breadth of the partner network; and the agreements that provide for exchange.
• Three were rated Largely Compliant: the availability of banking records, the availability of accounting records, and how effectively information is exchanged in practice.
• One, covering whether ownership and identity information is available, was rated Partially Compliant.

Ownership gaps

The bulk of the key recommendations relate to beneficial ownership, meaning the individuals who in the end own or control a company, and to how the relevant rules are applied and enforced. Among the shortcomings the report lists are:

• the absence of guidance on identifying beneficial owners
• no requirement to refresh beneficial owner details at set intervals where no event triggers an update
• limited oversight from the Registrar of Businesses, and patchy supervision of anti-money laundering duties
• inactive companies, which in the report's view jeopardise whether information is available
• records not consistently kept for the full five years after an entity has ceased to exist

Reforms, practice and next steps

The Maldives became a member of the Global Forum in 2016. Beneficial ownership requirements have formed part of the Companies Act since 2024, and the Registrar of Businesses keeps a central register. Since April 2026, legal entities registering for tax have additionally had to disclose the information to the tax administration.

Actual exchanges remain rare. Of the 156 jurisdictions its agreements cover, 148 have agreements in force, and it is with those partners that exchange is possible. The Maldives has sent a small number of requests and has received none. A specialist exchange of information unit exists, supported by a guide, but the report could not fully gauge how effective they are in practice and advises the Maldives to monitor this.

The review period ran between 1 October 2022 and 30 September 2025, with the legal framework assessed as it stood on 14 August 2026. After approval by the Peer Review and Monitoring Group on 30 September 2026, the report was adopted by the Global Forum on 30 October 2026. The enhanced monitoring methodology means the Maldives is expected to submit a self-assessment to the group setting out what it has done in response to the recommendations.