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There is a little more time to prepare for FATCA writes David Harkness
Readers will be familiar with the wide-ranging nature of the new US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) under which financial institutions worldwide could be required to withhold US tax on payments they make to other entities – even where the entities and transactions have no nexus with the United States. FATCA’s purpose – to prevent US persons holding undisclosed offshore bank accounts and other investments – is laudable but its scope is extraordinarily wide.
A welcome development is that to allow a more orderly implementation of FATCA the US Treasury and IRS have announced that they intend to postpone the start of FATCA by six months.
The consequences of this include:
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