Fatca special report

May 2015 -- Sponsored by SIX Financial Information

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Changing Requirements and Changing Methods

As the first year of the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) being in effect is almost complete, the rules for reporting still appear to be in flux, as are the ways firms are responding to Fatca compliance and setting out methods to address its rules on a regular basis.

In the Virtual Roundtable in this report, SIX Financial Information's Jacob Gertel says it will be interesting to see what experience is gained by going through the US Internal Revenue Service reporting process for Fatca for this year. State Street's George Sullivan points to the changing nature of guidance on reporting, and rules for transmitting Fatca reporting that are not finalized in all jurisdictions.

On top of that, the data needed for Fatca compliance is lower in quality than expected, as Deloitte & Touche's Jon Watts observes in the Q&A on page 14 of this report. That is due to a struggle to rationalize and normalize client data dispersed across legacy systems, he says, and compounded by inconsistent data capture requirements.

While firms are trying to change business strategies and processes for data organization and operations, according to SIX's Gertel, they may be finding they have opened a Pandora's Box of fragmented and mismanaged tax data collection and administration methods, as Watts asserts.

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