The final hurdle will be the Swiss Senate, which is expected to vote on the matter later this month.
Yesterday’s vote was 112 votes in favour to 51, with 21 abstentions.
The vote was the latest in a series of events that have marked Switzerland’s evolution from a secretive Alpine tax haven to a more transparent international financial centre. The journey is generally considered to have begun in 2009, when Switzerland’s biggest bank, UBS, admitted to criminal wrong-doing by helping Americans to evade US taxes, and agreed to turn over more than 4,450 client names and pay a $780m fine.
Until that point, Switzerland’s strict, fiercely guarded banking secrecy rules had made it an attractive place to keep money that one did not wish others to know about. Now its banks and financial institutions are having to find other reasons to attract investors, or at least, investors from countries like the US that have sought to learn more about money held there by their citizens.
Under FATCA, Swiss banks will be expected to provide information on all accounts they hold that belong to Americans, whether they are resident in the US or elsewhere.
As reported, the G20 group of countries issued a statement on Friday saying that they would seek to introduce automatic exchange of tax information as the global standard by 2015. This, they said, would help to end “tax avoidance, harmful practices and aggressive tax planning”.
Yesterday’s vote comes a little more than a week after the Swiss government agreed to a separate deal with the US, involving its banks, and the issue of their obligations to the US with respect to information about American account-holders.
It also comes three months after Swiss lawmakers were asked to approve a draft law that would pave the way for the country’s banks to pass depositors’ information to US authorities, another step towards making FATCA compliance possible.
