Last-minute rush on Fatca keeps local business busy
SOME businesses are taking last-minute action to fulfil their reporting obligations for the first deadline of US Fatca – the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.
With the deadline for filing Fatca returns today, local business Fusion Systems has seen a rush of interest over the past week for companies seeking help in generating the return XML files for the first year of Fatca reporting.
‘We had expected the volume of new enquiries to really diminish during June but the opposite has been the case,’ said Alan Rowe, sales and marketing director at Fusion Systems. ‘We have been signing up new clients to our bureau service every day in the last week and some of the pieces of business are quite substantial.
‘The business is coming from a number of locations and not just the Channel Islands. Fortunately we have had sufficient capacity to accommodate the business and have not turned any away.’
A number of jurisdictions have extended reporting deadlines to 31 July or, like Jersey, allowed companies to apply for extensions, though Guernsey has not.
‘It is quite foreseeable we will also be busy in July in the run-up to the extended deadlines in other jurisdictions around the world. Subsequently we will be transitioning into a new phase of helping clients get ready for the next reporting year, where they are more likely to install our software within their business to manage the larger reporting volumes under the additional agreements.’
The industry has been warning about the deadline for many months.
‘Why businesses have left it quite so late to engage a supplier seems to be down to a number of factors,’ Mr Rowe added.
‘While the technical complexity of the return file has been known about for a long time, it would seem that the issues of entity classification, data collection and remediation have been at the forefront of Fatca reporting processes in many organisations, while perhaps insufficient thought was given to the actual method of reporting.
‘For Fusion it has proven to be a great opportunity to open up new business on and off the island and across other market sectors that we have not previously addressed.’
