Last month, the Swiss Federal Council took the decision to suspend co-operation under the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI) between itself and Russia.
Obligations under AEoI stem from the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). However, similar data sharing obligations arise under other tax-related information exchange including:
- Country-by-Country (CbC) reporting,
- Exchange of Information on Request (EoIR); and
- the spontaneous exchange of information.
These are also suspended.
In respect of the CRS based obligations, this means that where a Swiss Reporting Financial Institution (FI) has submitted information for 2021 to the Swiss Federal Tax Administration (FTA) on its Russian resident clients then the FTA will not provide the Russian authorities with the data.
It is worth pointing out that all obligations of a Swiss Reporting FI remain in place following the move. It is simply that the FTA will not pass this information over the Swiss authorities as would normally be the case.
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