The Premier and his Finance Minister have completed their two-day trip to Washington declaring it a success, as they've done each year since the US Consul General organised the meetings in 2005.

It is no surprise that they should extol the efforts of their Government on behalf of the people. That's what government leaders do; and the truth is that any face time we get to explain Bermuda to US legislators is time well spent.

But let's be clear about one thing, their mission was compromised before they left for Washington.

Bermuda has a cloud over its head in Washington and the cloud is there because the Finance Minister was ineffective in protecting the name and reputation of the island at a crucial time.

This is a serious allegation to make but consider the headline in The Washington Times on Wednesday: "Bermuda wants off the list of tax havens."

How Bermuda got on that list is the fault of the Finance Minister, and to support that contention here is a passage from the same Washington Times article:

"On April 2, when the Group of 20 wealthy and emerging-market nations met at the London economic summit, Bermuda had signed three TIEAs (Tax Information Exchange Agreements) since it reached its commitment with the OECD in 2000. Years of efforts bore fruit within the next two weeks, when Bermuda signed eight more agreements, leaving it one shy."

April 2nd was the deadline to have 12 TIEAs in place. But our Ministry of Finance appeared oblivious to the deadline, telling The Royal Gazette on April 24 that it had been working toward a later, incorrect, deadline.

By being nine shy of the 12 TIEAs on April 2, Bermuda was placed on the OECD's grey list of jurisdictions that had not done enough in time to implement tax cooperation rules. This is the "tax haven" list that clouds Bermuda's efforts in Washington.

But let's look at that failure with the OECD a little more closely: Bermuda committed to signing TIEAs nearly nine years ago but for some reason that was not enough time to get the job done. The Washington Times suggested there was a frantic scramble in the wake of the G20 summit but the cold reality is that was too late to avoid being grey-listed.

Why is that? Why was nine years not enough time? My view is that this Government suffers from a deep-seated complacency that impairs its understanding of accountability and the importance of fulfilling its commitments. This is absolutely unacceptable in the international arena where Bermuda's good name is on the line.

We have seen this complacency hurt Bermuda's reputation before, most notably in 2007 when the International Monetary Fund auditors found that Bermuda had failed to implement dozens of recommendations from its 2003 inspection.

Mr. Jeffrey Owens, the OECD's director of tax policy, was unusually blunt about Bermuda's failure to meet its TIEA commitments: "Bermuda," he said in late April, committed in 2000 but there has not been enough actions taken since that time. We're not interested in just commitment, we want to see to see tax information exchange agreements agreed and implemented swiftly."

Other jurisdictions, with economies similar to Bermuda's, were on top of the situation and, in a last minute rush, made the deadline.

I leave it to the Finance Minister to explain this pattern of sluggishness, this seeming inability to quickly react to a changing international environment — and I invite the press to ask her about it — but the bottom line this week is that Bermuda went to Washington with a tax haven label hanging around its neck that did not need to be there.

It simply put one more hurdle in the road at a time Bermuda's international economy is threatened by US legislative action.

Remember, the United States is a founding member of the OECD.

Think of how much better the Washington trip would have been, how much more credibility we would have had if Bermuda had signed enough TIEAs and made the top tier of tax cooperative countries.

That is the differentiation Bermuda needed to position us to succeed. Instead we spent our time fighting off a tax haven label that did not have to be there, with the Minister complaining about the injustice of Bermuda being grey-listed with jurisdictions that did not enjoy our "cachet".

That word cachet caught my attention, because it speaks again to the complacency that is doing so much to hurt us.

We have to get real about Bermuda. We have to stop thinking that the great reputation and quality we are all proud of is obvious to people and governments overseas. It is not.

I advise anyone in the Finance Ministry that if they ever feel the warm waves of complacency coming on to grab an atlas and reacquaint themselves with the dot that is Bermuda.

We are facing a very big challenge in the world today and we need to be at our best to avoid damage to our economy.

Our relative success and prosperity in international business is encouraging some people in major countries to think that our success has been at their expense and, as a result, they are in the process of taking back what they believe is rightfully theirs.

It is our daunting challenge to counteract this thinking. To do that, we need to be more in tune with unfolding developments overseas, and mount more effective and timely efforts than we've shown to date; certainly one that is not tripped up by the mistakes of complacency.