About FATCA |
The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is a new US reporting and withholding regime, the aim of which is to ensure tax compliance among US persons who hold offshore accounts. FATCA seeks to enforce reporting of US held foreign accounts by mandating 30% withholding on US source income (including gross sales proceeds), should any account holder or Foreign Financial Institution (FFI) not comply.
FATCA applies to all types of Foreign Financial Institutions including banks, brokers, insurance companies and investment funds. FATCA will impose a significant compliance burden on foreign institutions in terms of building systems and processes to identify/verify customer accounts, obtain further customer details, report account activity and track US payments for cases of withholding.
FATCA was signed into law on 18th March 2010 and will become effective from 1st July 2013, by which time all Foreign Financial Institutions must have entered into a compliance agreement with the US Treasury in order to avoid any withholding on US source income. Following the publication of Notice 2011-53, a number of transitional rules apply.
Deloitte has developed a FATCA Resource Library to help companies understand the impacts to their business. For queries please contact our Irish FATCA team.
