The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is just the latest manifestation of a long tradition of international cooperation for law enforcement and tax collection purposes, specifically contained in various Tax Information Exchange Agreements that the U.S. has signed with a multitude of other countries. FATCA imposes a 30% withholding requirement on payments from the U.S. to any Foreign Financial Institution that has not registered with the IRS and agreed to follow certain procedures for detecting and reporting accounts held by U.S. taxpayers. In order to improve tax compliance and implement FATCA, the U.S. has entered into Intergovernmental Agreements that essentially require treaty partners (FATCA Partners) to adopt FATCA as their national law.
Two types of U.S. accounts are subject to FATCA reporting and are referred to as “Reportable Accounts”. The first type is a Depository Account held by an individual who is a resident of a FATCA Partner country and that receives more than $10 of interest in any given calendar year. Depository Accounts are basically checking, savings, certificates of deposits and similar types of accounts, including certain interest-bearing insurance investments. The other type of Reportable Account is a Financial Account held by a resident of the FATCA Partner country, including entities that certify that they are resident in the FATCA Partner country for tax purposes. A Financial Account is basically any account maintained at a Financial Institution. U.S. citizens and tax residents, living in the U.S. or abroad, who have accidentally or intentionally failed to report income, bank accounts, corporations, trusts or other assets outside the U.S. are increasingly at risk of being detected, fined and in some cases even incarcerated and deported. Anyone unsure whether they have fulfilled all their tax and information reporting obligations should seek the privileged advice of a U.S. tax attorney as soon as possible to determine the safest and most economical way of resolving their non-compliance prior to detection.
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