On Friday, October 2, 2015, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced the exchange of financial account information with certain foreign tax administrations, meeting a key Sept. 30 milestone related to FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.
The IRS successfully and timely developed the information system infrastructure, procedures, and data use and confidentiality safeguards to protect taxpayer data while facilitating reciprocal automatic exchange of tax information with certain foreign jurisdiction tax administrators as specified under the intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) implementing FATCA. This information exchange is part of the IRS’s overall efforts to implement FATCA, enacted in 2010 by Congress to target non-compliance by U.S. taxpayers using foreign accounts or foreign entities.
In response to the enactment of FATCA and other jurisdictions’ interest in facilitating and participating in the exchange of financial account information, the U.S. government entered into a number of bilateral IGAs that set the groundwork for cooperation between the jurisdictions in this area. Certain IGAs not only enable the IRS to receive this information from FFIs, but enable more efficient exchange by allowing a foreign jurisdiction tax administration to gather the specified information and provide it to the IRS. And some IGAs also require the IRS to reciprocally exchange certain information about accounts maintained by residents of foreign jurisdictions in U.S. financial institutions with their jurisdictions’ tax authorities. Under these reciprocal IGAs, the first exchange was required to take place by September 30. Meeting this deadline reflects a significant international collaboration and partnership with dozens of jurisdictions around the world.
