Among the most recent entrants are Thomson Reuters, the news and business intelligence provider, and Markit and Compliance Technologies International (CTI), which have joined forces to develop a product they say is aimed at “all non-US-domiciled asset managers and structured investment vehicles” that are obliged to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.
Signed into law by President Obama in 2010, FATCA is designed to crack down on Americans who make use of overseas banks and other asset managers to avoid their US tax obligations, by forcing non-US banks and fianancial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service on any accounts they have that are held by American citizens.
In October, US tax authorities pushed back several key FATCA implementation deadlines, with the result that these foreign financial institutions, or FFIs, will now have until 1 Jan 2014 to put in place the necessary procedures for meeting the act’s reporting requirements.
The Thomson Reuters for FATCA Solution, as the Thomson Reuters’ product is called, is described as benefiting from the company’s existing expertise and resources in the areas of governance, risk and compliance, and tax and accounting, as currently used “by organisations around the world”.
It is designed to “enable organisations to identify, maintain and validate their customer records to assist in FATCA compliance,” the company said, in a statement announcing the product.
Thomson Reuters describes its FATCA product as being comprised of “modules for ‘on-boarding’, featuring US indicia search; self-assessment, featuring W-8 and W-9 form preparation and collection; and tax information reporting, featuring forms 1042, 1042S and 1099”.
It also “features configurable regulatory and management reporting”, and is “designed to integrate easily with organisations’ existing processes and technology, and is offered as an installed or hosted solution,” Thomson Reuters said.
More about the new product may be found by clicking here.
The Markit and CTI product, meanwhile, is called FATCA Service Bureau. It “combines US tax law expertise, client documentation review, IRS registration and tax form validation and reporting", according to a statement on Markit’s website.
It is described as building on CTI’s existing outsourcing services operations, which provide such services to businesses as due diligence, withholding, and reporting functions.
For the estimated “thousands” of fund managers who are thought to be planning to register as FFIs under FATCA, “FATCA Service Bureau provides the highest level of domain expertise and operational efficiency in a low-cost solution,” the statement says.
A brochure on the FATCA Service Bureau product may be downloaded from the Markit website by clicking here.
