The Cayman Islands Department for International Tax Cooperation has recently announced that its online Automatic Exchange of Information Portal is now open.
The portal should be used by Cayman financial institutions in order to notify the Cayman Islands Tax Information Authority of their reporting obligations under US FATCA and/or the similar tax compliance legislation relating to the exchange of information with the United Kingdom. The portal will also be used for the reporting obligations of Cayman financial institutions under the Common Reporting Standard once these standards have been implemented in the Cayman Islands.
It should be noted that in the case of US FATCA the Cayman financial institution should already have registered with the IRS via the IRS portal and obtained a Global Intermediary Identification Number before beginning the notification and registration process via the Cayman Automatic Exchange of Information Portal.
The notification process will need to be completed by a principal point of contact that has been formally authorised as such by the Cayman financial institution. Once the notification process is complete a user account will be opened for the principal point of contact within the Automatic Exchange of Information Portal. This user account can then be used to submit data in order to satisfy the Cayman financial institution's reporting obligations either by way of XML file upload or by way of manual data entry.
The deadline for notification of reporting obligations and reporting of relevant data is of 30th April 2015. Cayman Islands financial institutions should ensure that they have nominated and formally authorised a relevant point of contact to open a user account and that the relevant data has been collated for submission via the portal in good time before this deadline.
The Cayman Islands Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) Portal User Guide v1.1 can be access via the following link:
http://tia.gov.ky/pdf/User_Guide.pdf
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
