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This is a new requirement of the Department of the Treasury within the framework of the strategy to combat money laundering and tax evasion; the information will be turned immediately to the countries that have signed the FATCA reciprocal agreement.
US banks began to demand from their foreign customers their fiscal identification to check if the accounts are declared in their respective countries.
This is the form in the new W-8BEN form that must be completed, all customers with bank accounts in the United States. This is the “Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting (Individuals)”, revised in July 2017.
The first part requires identification data of the final beneficiary and, together with the traditional data, the legend “Foreign tax identifying number” is added, that is the tax identification number for non-residents of the United States. In the case of Argentina, it is the CUIT.
The form is generated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the Treasury Department. This requirement is part of the IRS’s transparency and anti-evasion measures.
One such measure is the “Fatca” law, which obliges all banks in the world to report the accounts of United States residents.
In this sense, some countries provide this data unilaterally, while others have negotiated reciprocal exchange agreements (IGA model).
A note on Form W-8BEN states that “if you are a resident of a Fatca partner jurisdiction (eg, with the One IGA model, jurisdiction with reciprocity), certain information may be provided to the tax residence jurisdiction.”
Two sources from the local financial system and a tax adviser told LA NACION that this new order is part of the United States’ strategy to cooperate, with its times and conditions, with global financial transparency.
It should be remembered that USA. has not yet ratified its signature in the OECD’s multilateral tax information exchange agreement signed by 100 countries, including Argentina. Under this agreement, as reported by the NATION, the AFIP will begin receiving information from the accounts of Argentines from 48 territories, including Seychelles and Cayman.
This information is key to the post-laundering control that AFIP will begin to make, in order to cross-check the data of the fiscal sincerity regime with the affidavits of the taxpayers of 2016.
In this sense, the information published on Sunday in the financial market made quite a “noise” by the newspaper Page 12 that spread a list of contributors who went into laundering.
This information is protected by fiscal secrecy, to the point where most AFIP agents do not even have access to such data when conducting their inspections.
For this reason, some tax advisors expect some reaction from the tax body, especially on the eve of receiving the first batch of information from the OECD agreement and in the middle of negotiations with the US. to sign a bilateral tax exchange agreement.
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