William Byrnes has authored more than 30 books addressing matters of taxes and finances that have moved over 100,000 combined copies. Williams Byrnes wrote his most recent book, the LexisNexis Guide to FATCA Compliance, which has become the financial industry’s desk reference handbook for addressing automatic exchange of information.
Put into effect in 2010, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) serves as the United States’ basis for collecting financial information about US taxpayers from foreign financial institutions like banks, investment funds, and trust companies. The origins of the act can be traced back to 2009 when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collected a $780 million penalty from Switzerland’s UBS AG. The penalty came in connection with countless American citizens who failed to pay taxes on their international income, regardless of their place of residence. A number of Swiss banks have since entered into non prosecution agreements, including a record $2.6 billion fine levied against Credit Suisse.
With the increase of fines, international banking has arguably become more transparent. The OECD has copied FATCA and is pushing to have all countries adopt it to share the financial information of taxpayers with each other. The OECD’s transparency initiatives, called the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), will go into effect globally in 2017 among at least 70 countries. The US has signed FATCA agreements, known as IGAs, with over 100 countries, and to date almost 150,000 foreign financial institutions have registered with the US, agreeing to provide Treasury the financial information of US taxpayers.