Switzerland received taxpayers’ data for 2019 according to CRS

Information on millions of financial accounts from 75 countries that comply with CRS reporting standards will now be shared with the Swiss Federal Tax Office (FTO).

It is noteworthy that the exchange of information with 63 partner countries of the CRS agreement with Switzerland is carried out on mutual terms. At the same time, Switzerland received information, but in return did not provide any financial data due to the fact that such countries either do not comply with international requirements for maintaining the security and confidentiality of data, or they simply do not intend to receive this data. It is noted that FTO Switzerland for 2019 has already sent information on 3.1 million financial accounts and received data on 2.4 million accounts.

To date, the FTO Switzerland has registered more than 7.5 thousand accountable financial institutions, including banks, trusts and insurance companies. These organizations collected information and transferred them to the FTO.

When exchanging information, tax authorities receive the following data:

- customer name;

- registration address;

- tax identification number of the person who owns the account;

- account balance;

- income from capital;

- Information about the financial institution that provides the report.

With this information, Swiss tax authorities can verify tax declarations of financial statements of taxpayers in partner countries abroad.

Since January 2017, the legislation on the introduction of a global standard for automatic exchange of information has entered into force in Switzerland. The first data exchange was carried out in September 2018. The largest data exchange was made in 2018-2019 between Germany and Switzerland. It is expected that already in 2020 such an exchange of information will be carried out with 90 countries. Between Ukraine and Switzerland such an exchange of information has not yet been conducted.