The OECD has included both countries in the list of countries that do not meet global standards on transparency in fiscal reporting.
Although the signing of the minimum number of bilateral tax information exchange agreements has allowed countries such as Costa Rica and Uruguay to leave the ‘gray list’ maintained by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, now the challenge is to pass the scrutiny of filters detecting whether local regulations are effective in allowing tax information to be provided in a transparent manner.
With the exception of Honduras, which reported a slight improvement, all countries in the region reported significant drops in the new edition of the Corruption Perception Index, by Transparency International.
In 2011 Costa Rica remained the best positioned in Central America, but fell from position 41 to 50, followed by El Salvador, which fell from 73 to 80, Panama (73 to 86), Guatemala (91 to 120) , Honduras (climbed from 134 to 129) and Nicaragua (dropped from 127 to 134).
The Open Budget Index 2008 examines and compares the budget transparency of 85 governments, including Central America.
The index is prepared by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) and the best placed Central American countries (Costa Rica and Guatemala) obtained only 45 out of 100 possible points. El Salvador followed with 37 and then Nicaragua and Honduras with less than 20 points.