As the UK's tax collection agency, HM Revenue & Customs, is reported to be preparing to reach out to "hundreds" of customers of a bank located in Puerto Rico over possible tax irregularities, financial services industry observers have been pointing out that the bank in question is located in one of five U.S. territories that, like the United States itself, have not signed up to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard (CRS).

While the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA has been getting all the headlines lately – certainly here at the American Expat Financial News Journal – FATCA’s global counterpart, the OECD/G20 regime known as the Common Reporting Standard, has quietly been continuing to sign up new jurisdictions.

When the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act finally came into force around the world in 2014 –  four years after it was signed into law by President Obama – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was preparing its own account information reporting regulations package.

The Common Reporting Standard, as it was to be known as, differed from FATCA in that it was intended to be global, and fully reciprocal – meaning that those countries participating in the collecting and forwarding of information about other countries' resident taxpayer's financial accounts would expect to receive the same data about their taxpayers resident in that country... 

Correspondence and other documents having to do with the way the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA was agreed upon, and is now enforced by EU governments – along with similar materials having to do with the OECD’s more recent automatic exchange of information (AEOI) regime known as the Common Reporting Standard – have been published by a campaigning lawyer with London’s Mishcon de Reya law firm.

Growing global enforcement of two major anti-tax-evasion regulations – America's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, and the OECD's almost-identical Common Reporting Standard – has begun to impact financial institutions and their clients in Mexico and LatAm generally who also have ties to Israel and, in some cases, the U.S., the Jerusalem Post newspaper  has reported. 

Switzerland's Federal Council has announced that it has "decided to immediately suspend the automatic exchange of financial account information (AEOI) with Bulgaria" due to what it called "a problem with the country's data security" – a reference to the revelation earlier this year that the personal data of some 5 million Bulgarian and foreign taxpayers had been hacked from the Bulgarian National Revenue Agency.

The eight-year-long effort by organizations representing American expats around the world to convince the U.S. government to abolish FATCA appears likely to soon find itself in the middle of another battlefield.

 A "blacklist" of 20 countries that offer so-called “golden passports” to affluent foreigners in order to raise revenue has been published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, as it warned of the potential misuse of these schemes to hide offshore assets from the scrutiny of the OECD's recently-introduced Common Reporting Standard scheme.