Big news on Fatca: multilateral automatic information exchange

We don't have time to do this justice right now - but we will do when we have some time. This joint statement from the UK Treasury is a corker:

the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom wish to intensify their co-operation in combating international tax evasion.

What do they envisage?

"An intergovernmental approach to FATCA implementation . . . the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom have agreed to explore a common approach to FATCA implementation through domestic reporting and reciprocal automatic exchange and based on existing bilateral tax treaties."

We have written a fair bit about FATCA in the past - it's a major transparency initiative spearheaded by the U.S. We need to analyse the statement, and other things that have been happening with FATCA today (e.g. see here and here and here); we'll write more about this in due course.

Hat tip: David McNair