African tax authorities are steadily turning transparency into revenue. The latest Tax Transparency in Africa 2025: Africa Initiative Progress Report shows sharper use of cross-border information tools, wider political commitment, and tangible fiscal gains—yet also exposes the practical bottlenecks that still blunt the continent’s ability to capture offshore income at scale.
The headline story is impact. In 2024, eleven African countries identified almost €400 million in additional tax, interest and penalties by using exchange-of-information (EOI) standards. Of that, roughly €123 million came from information-on-request (EOIR) and offshore investigations, and over €275 million from automatic exchange of financial account data (CRS) and related voluntary disclosure programmes. Since 2009, the cumulative total disclosed by African administrations has reached at least €4.2 billion—evidence that transparency is now a material pillar of domestic resource mobilisation.
Momentum is visible in day-to-day cooperation. African members sent 1,756 EOI requests in 2024—almost double the 2023 figure—and received 975, making the region a net demander of foreign information and signalling more assertive audit strategies. Twenty-three countries actively sent requests, a new high. Engagement with the multilateral infrastructure also deepened: Madagascar ratified the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (MAAC) and Algeria signed it, steps that broaden partners and tools available for cooperation.
Automatic exchange is where the scale effects show. In 2024, African members receiving CRS data obtained information on about 2.28 million offshore financial accounts with an aggregate value exceeding €211 billion, while sending data on roughly 1.09 million accounts totaling nearly €36 billion. That asymmetry—receiving far more than they send—implies continued upside for risk-based audits, provided administrations can match and exploit the files efficiently. Currently, all recipients use CRS data for audits, 80% for risk assessment and 60% for collection; yet the average automatic matching rate reported for 2024 was only 37%, with wide dispersion between best and worst performers. The priority is clear: invest in data integration to convert a large inflow of signals into enforceable assessments.
Coverage is expanding, albeit unevenly. As of end-2024, 12 of 39 African members had committed to start CRS exchanges by a specific date; five were already exchanging, and Kenya became the sixth after successfully completing implementation and making its first exchanges in January 2025. Four African members have also committed to the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), with first exchanges targeted for 2027–2028. These timelines matter: they anchor the build-out of confidentiality controls, legal frameworks, supervisory regimes for financial institutions, and analytics capacity that make AEOI usable—not merely symbolic.
Governance and legal plumbing continue to improve. Most African Global Forum members now have functional EOI units, delegated competent-authority powers, manuals and tracking tools—capabilities that correlate with higher request volumes and better turnaround. A notable 2024 development was the adoption of a Model Strategy to Maximise the Use of Exchange of Information on Request, designed by officials from 18 countries to embed EOIR into core audit workflows rather than treating it as a specialist niche. This is the right move: the report attributes the €123 million EOIR yield to auditors using EOI infrastructure as a routine instrument, not an afterthought.
Peer review outcomes point to real—but incomplete—compliance. Seventy-one percent of fully reviewed African members have achieved satisfactory second-round EOIR ratings, with Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda all clearing that bar in 2024. The persistent weak spot is beneficial ownership: even where registries exist, supervision and enforcement to ensure accuracy and timeliness lag. Without credible beneficial-ownership data, information requests stall or fail, and automatic data cannot be reliably matched to real taxpayers. Expect scrutiny—and assistance—to intensify here because beneficial ownership is the hinge that connects transparency standards to actual collections.
Capacity building is working and should scale. In 2024 alone, more than 1,130 officials were trained domestically by graduates of the Train-the-Trainer programme, complementing regional workshops and the Women Leaders in Tax Transparency initiative. These investments are not just “soft” outcomes: the report links them to improvements in the quantity and quality of EOI requests and to more consistent use of CRS data across compliance functions. The next capability frontier is information security and data governance, where a growing network supports the confidentiality and safeguarding requirements that underpin reciprocal exchange.
Read through a policy lens, the report’s conclusions are crisp. First, transparency is already paying for itself—€400 million in one year is non-trivial fiscal space—yet the delta between the €211 billion of offshore assets “seen” through CRS and the revenue booked suggests substantial headroom. Second, the binding constraint is not political will so much as operational readiness: data matching, analytics, and case selection must catch up with the volume of information now available. Third, legal fundamentals—especially verifiable beneficial ownership—remain the Achilles’ heel and should be treated as core infrastructure, on par with e-filing or taxpayer registries.
What should administrations do next? Begin with an enterprise-level data plan for CRS and, soon, CARF. Map data flows from receipt to enforcement; build deterministic and probabilistic matching against domestic identifiers; and institutionalise feedback loops so audit outcomes continuously refine risk models. Make the new Model Strategy for EOIR a management metric—requests per auditor, turnaround times, and assessed revenue from EOIR-supported cases—so leadership can see where coaching or escalation is needed. Finally, align beneficial-ownership supervision with tax use-cases: enforce filing and accuracy where the absence of a reliable controller identity blocks an investigation. These are concrete, near-term steps that convert the report’s promising statistics into durable revenue streams.
The political consensus behind the Africa Initiative is holding, participation is widening, and the tools are in place. The task for 2025–2026 is execution: matching the breadth of information now flowing into tax administrations with the depth of systems, people, and laws required to turn transparency into trust and collections.
Source : OECD, Tax Transparency in Africa 2025: Africa Initiative Progress Report (2025).
