Common Reporting Standard

The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is an information standard for the automatic exchange of tax and financial information on a global level, which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed in 2014. Its purpose is to combat tax evasion. The idea was based on the USA Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) implementation agreements and its legal basis is the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters. As of 2016, 83 countries had signed an agreement to implement it. First reporting is planned September 2017. The CRS has been criticised for leaving too many loopholes open, for how developing countries were not considered and involved and that non-reciprocity agreements were catering to tax havens.

Until 2014, the parties to most treaties for sharing assets, incomes and tax information internationally had shared it upon request, which was not effective in preventing tax evasion.

In May 2014, forty-seven countries tentatively agreed on a "common reporting standard", formally referred to as the Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information: an agreement to share information on residents' assets and incomes automatically in conformation with the standard. Endorsing countries included all 34 OECD countries, as well as Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Africa.

In September 2014, the G-20 major economies, at their meeting in Cairns, Australia, issued a G20 Common Reporting Standard implementation plan.

The new system was intended to transfer all relevant information automatically and systematically. The agreement has informally been referred to as GATCA (the global version of FATCA)", but "CRS is not just an extension of FATCA".

As of October 2014^[update], 51 countries had signed up to the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement, to automatically exchange information based on Article 6 of the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters The agreement specifies the details of what information will be exchanged and when, as set out in the Standard.

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