Intergovernmental Agreements and the Implementation of FATCA in Europe

Abstract

FATCA is a US domestic tax policy that requires Foreign Financial Institutions around the world to provide the IRS information regarding their US clients. Recognizing this extraterritorial characteristic and the troubles associated with it, the US Treasury Department developed the Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs), which have served the double purpose of coordinating FATCA at an international level and influencing the new international standards on automatic exchange of information. Nevertheless, the IGAs are instruments that still need to be improved, at least in order to guarantee their successful implementation in Europe. The first part of this article explores the legal nature and the characteristic of the IGAs, concluding that they possess an asymmetric legal nature that can lead to conflicts of interpretation. Likewise, it concludes that their contribution toward international transparency is incompatible with the existence of other instruments in Europe that seek the opposite goal of protecting bank secrecy, although it recognizes the importance of the most recent achievements at the European level in order to ensure a coherent and consistent system of automatic exchange of information. The second part of this article analyses three grey areas in the IGAs implementation process in Europe (i.e., “quoted Eurobonds” in the United Kingdom; group requests under the Switzerland-United States IGA, and the “coordination timing” provision of the IGA Model 1A), concluding that there is still work to be done in order for the IGAs to grant an acceptable level of reciprocity in practice.

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