Australia Legislates For Common Reporting Standard
The Australian Government has introduced legislation to implement the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Common Reporting Standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information.
Treasurer Scott Morrison said: “The Standard will assist the tax office to crack down on taxpayers hiding funds and investments offshore in order to avoid paying their fair share of tax in Australia.”
In June, Australia signed the multilateral competent authority agreement for the Standard, which enables the information to be exchanged between jurisdictions’ tax authorities. The Australian Government will implement the Standard from July 1, 2017, and the first exchange of information with overseas tax authorities will take place in 2018. More than 95 jurisdictions have committed to its implementation.
“The Standard ensures that the Australian Taxation Office will receive information annually on Australians’s offshore accounts, such as investment income and balances, and use this information to check if the offshore income has been declared in Australian tax returns. In exchange, certain financial institutions in Australia will collect information on foreign residents’s accounts and report it to the Australian Taxation Office. It will then be reported to the foreign residents’s tax authorities,” Morrison explained.
