Al-Wasat News, Bahrain’s first independent newspaper, reports on a FATCA seminar held by Deloitte in Jordan. Unfortunately I don’t think we have any Arabic speakers among our readers or commenters who could read the original Arabic article, but you can always try to puzzle your way through Google Translate’s English rendering of it. Deloitte also has an English-language press release about a FATCA seminar they held in Jordan early last month, which may be referring to the same event.

Unsurprisingly, Deloitte is urging banks to comply with FATCA, and of course offering Deloitte’s consulting services to help them become compliant. One Deloitte partner in Oman was quoted as stating, roughly: “the principle of competition forces the banks of Jordan to cooperate closely with the banks and the Central Bank in order to become compliant with the law of FATCA”. There are no quotes from any actual bankers in Jordan, so it’s hard to judge the on-the-ground reaction. (We’ve written previously about Lebanon’s hostile reaction to FATCA).

I’m very curious to know whether Deloitte and all these other cross-border tax services firms are mentioning the “local FFI” option at all to their clients — a form of “deemed compliance” would allow banks and other institutions to avoid having to report any of their account-holders to the IRS, as long as they could comply with some rather onerous requirements (such as proving that 98% of account-holders are local residents and not advertising U.S. dollar accounts on their websites).