More Jurisdictions commit to CRS Exchanges

OECD publish updated list of jurisdictions committed to CRS Exchanges

On the 23 April 2024, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published an updated list of jurisdictions committed to collecting self-certification and the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI) Reporting.

Notable updates AEoI Status Commitments:

• Four jurisdictions have committed to their first CRS exchange in 2024.
  • These are Georgia, Kenya, Moldova, and Ukraine.
• An additional 9 set to implement the requirement in 2025, 2026 and 2027.
• Papua New Guinea is the 3rd Global Forum member to commit to AEoI reporting since the beginning of the year, after Senegal and Cameroon.
• Almost 75% of the Global Forum members (126 from 171) are now committed to starting AEOI by a specific date and a large majority are already exchanging.

CRS requires Financial Institutions (FIs) residing in a participating jurisdictions to identify and report any tax residents or reportable accounts on an annual basis. FIs in CRS adopter countries will need to ensure that they stay up to date with the list of participating jurisdictions, as they are obligated to report their account holders from all participating countries which have a bilateral agreement for the exchange.

The updated list of activated exchange relationship for CRS information can be found on the OECD website: Exchange relationships - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (oecd.org)

Updated list of participating CRS jurisdictions

Below is the committed list of jurisdictions by year of first information exchange. For a complete list of countries please visit the OECD website AEOI commitments (oecd.org)

JURISDICTIONS UNDERTAKING FIRST EXCHANGES BY 2024 (4)

• Georgia, Kenya, Moldova, Ukraine

JURISDICTIONS UNDERTAKING FIRST EXCHANGES BY 2025 (6)

• Armenia, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda

JURISDICTIONS UNDERTAKING FIRST EXCHANGES BY 2026 (2)

• Cameroon, Mongolia

JURISDICTIONS UNDERTAKING FIRST EXCHANGES BY 2026 (1)

• Papua New Guinea

How do the AEoI Status Commitment Updates impact Tax Operations?

One of the key challenges in adapting to these AEoI Status changes is ensuring that internal systems and procedures are flexible and robust enough to accommodate them. This might involve investing in modern technology, software updates, or revisiting existing compliance workflows. Failure to adapt to these changes can result in non-compliance, which carries significant financial and reputational risks.

Furthermore, financial institutions in CRS participating jurisdictions should:

• Perform gap analysis between the information already available in their systems, and the information required for reporting.
• Revisit pre-existing accounts and new accounts onboarding due diligence processes and procedures.
• Work with the IT department to develop outputs of the required data elements to complete CRS reporting; and
• Train their team so they have a base knowledge of CRS requirements for further communication with the customers.

In addition to the addition of jurisdictions, Tax operations teams should already be planning to review and update their CRS compliance processes and systems by 2027, to implement the recently published CRS amendments (CRS 2.0) agreed to by the OECD last year.

How can TAINA help?

The OECD AEoI commitment updates paired with the ever-changing legislation around CRS 2.0 has further increased the risk for financial institutions; making it more important now than ever to address your CRS validation process. The TAINA Platform takes care of your CRS self certification compliance in a seamless end-to-end process whilst maintaining an up to date, robust and detailed CRS ruleset.

TAINA’s fully-automated FATCA and CRS Validation Platform can help financial institutions lighten their compliance burden whilst improving efficiency, reducing cost, mitigating risk and improving their overall customer and investor experience.

Using our flexible and lightweight platform you can automate and streamline your FATCA and CRS validation process whilst ensuring you have good year-end data that will result in clean FATCA and CRS reporting to tax authorities all year round.

We would love to talk to you more about your current documentation validation process and how our award-winning FATCA and CRS Validation platform may add value to your organisation.

For more information on how our fully automated FATCA and CRS Validation platform can add value to your business, get in touch or request a demo to see it in action.