By 2016 it will affect operations with San Marino and Liechtenstein and, by 2017, will be the turn of Switzerland and Principality of Monaco.
The Ministry of economy and finance has published the text of the Decree of December 28, 2015, in implementation of Law 18 June 2015, and the Directive of the European Union no. 2014/107/EU of December 9, 2014, amending Directive 2011/16/EU, as regards the automatic exchange of information for fiscal purposes (Official Journal, general series n. 303 of December 31, 2015).
This Decree is going to complete part of a project joined by most of countries in the OECD area.
Italy is one of the 77 States signatory to the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA) on automatic exchange of information.
The Ministerial Decree dated December 28, 2015 implements both, the OECD rules as well as the European Union rules, concerning the application of the so called Common Reporting Standards (CRS) – a system developed in response to the G20 request and approved by the OECD Council on 15 July 2014, calls on jurisdictions to obtain information from their financial institutions and automatically exchange that information with other jurisdictions on an annual basis.
In order to implement the exchange of information the Law 95/2015 had already been approved with the scope to ratified the provisions on the exchange of information with the United States, FATCA (implemented with DM 6 August 2015), as well as to introduced the aforementioned CRS.
This procedure consists of 5 main phases, described in paragraph 77 of the implementation Handbook of CRS:
- identification of financial intermediaries required to submit data to administrations;
- identification of financial accounts;
- identification of the accounts for which data are reported;
- due diligence to identify the beneficial owners of the accounts reported;
- sending data to the fiscal administrations, which will send the obtained data to the administrations of other States involved.
Based on the relevant provisions, financial intermediaries will transmit their information on accounts of non-residents subjects at the Italian Fiscal Administration. The deadline for such compliance by financial intermediaries is fixed at 30 June of the following calendar year, while the Italia Fiscal Administration must send the collected data to the relevant Administrations by September 30. These provisions, and related deadlines, are indeed the same for all the signatory countries.
