Implementation date has finally arrived! Governments have bridled at its extra-territorial effect, financial institutions have laboured to comply with its reporting and due diligence requirements, and some US Congressmen threatened to wreck it, but the withholding requirements under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) still took effect on July 1, six months later than planned. Efforts by the US to get foreign financial institutions (FFI) to supply it with information about their American account holders are bringing results. The Treasury announced on June 24 that almost 88,000 FFIs, including banks, funds, brokers, investment companies and custodians, were on the list of institutions that had registered on its online portal to become FATCA compliant.
Taxpayers can question the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about why it has issued a summons if they have reason to believe that bad faith was involved.
The Tax Justice Network (TJN) has accused the OECD of not consulting developing countries about the design of the framework for automatic information exchange (AIE), which the G20 has endorsed as the global model for information exchange.
The Australian Treasury has launched a consultation to discover the views of Australian financial institutions about when the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) should be introduced in Australia, how much it could cost them to implement and comply with and how those costs could be minimised.
Just a day after the EU Commission announced it would investigate whether the Netherlands breached European state aid rules in its tax treatment of Starbucks, that country updated its guidelines on advance tax rulings (ATRs), advance pricing agreements (APAs) and substance requirements.
