One subject we haven’t yet broached as part of AGRC’s webinar series is international taxation and the many rules that financial institutions have to comply with when operating in that sector.
Hence, we thought it’d be a good idea to take a closer look at the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), Common Reporting Standard (CRS), and the automatic exchange of information, reporting requirements set forth by the US and OECD to curtail global tax evasion.
As part of both FATCA and CRS, financial institutions across the globe have to share financial account information for foreign account holders with their home jurisdictions. In FATCA’s case, this applies solely to US citizens or residents who have bank accounts abroad, while in CRS’s, close to 100 jurisdictions are signatories and have to exchange information with each other.
In this webinar, which will take place on Wednesday, March 15 at 12:00 pm UK, our expert panellists will provide you with an introduction to FATCA and CRS compliance as a financial institution, their main challenges, how effective they have been in preventing tax evasion, and more.
Below are some of the questions to be discussed:
- How did FATCA and CRS come to be and what are their main objectives?
- While similar in scope, FATCA and CRS are somewhat different. Can you explain how they differ?
- What’s the process by which financial institutions have to go through when reporting? Are there any conditions that must be met to trigger reporting?
- Are there any penalties associated with non-compliance?
- What are some of the main reporting challenges financial institutions might face when trying to report?
- What have been some of the unintended consequences of both of these automatic exchange of information rules?
- What’s the future outlook for both FATCA and CRS?
- And plenty more!
Our Expert Panellist
Sam Bourton, Lecturer, UWE Bristol, UK
Sam has been a Lecturer in Law at the University of the West of England (UWE) since August 2018. She previously held the roles of Associate Lecturer in Law (2016-18) and Assistant Support Lecturer in Law (2014-2016) at UWE.
She is the Module Leader for the Law of Financial Crime and Regulation module on the LLB Programme and for the Introduction to Law in a Social, Business and Global Context module on the College of Business and Law Foundation Year. At postgraduate level, she supervises PhD students and LLM dissertation projects, and previously taught on the International Financial Crime, Foundations for Research and Research Methods modules on the LLM Programme.
Her research interests lie in the law relating to financial crime, particularly, the law relating to tax evasion and money laundering. She has written several publications and presented several conference papers on these topics. Her doctoral thesis, awarded without corrections in 2021, compared the law and enforcement policies pertaining to tax evasion in the UK and US.
Furthermore, she is an experienced researcher, working on several funded projects. She is a Co-Investigator for an Innovate UK funded project (£490,000 – Transform Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs); UK’s First Technology Line of Defence). She is also a Co-Investigator for the Cyber Security and Cyber Crime Research Cluster, funded by UWE Expanding Research Excellence (£100,000). Sam has previously been a co-investigator for another Innovate UK funded project (£268,000 – Detecting and Challenging Local Government Authority Fraud Committed by Organised Criminal Groups through Investigation Process Automation).
Sam has also submitted written evidence to several policy makers and influential organisations, including the Law Commission, the Public Bills Committee, the Manchester Arena Inquiry and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
Finally, she is a Steering Group Member of the South West Fraud Forum and an Advisory Board Member with the Journal of Economic Criminology for Elsevier (2022-present). Within UWE, she is a member of the Law School Research Committee, the Global Crime, Justice and Security Research Group, and the Cyber Security and Cyber Crime Cluster.