By now, we’ve all heard the news that Treasury had to extend the FATCA deadline by six months, a development which they attributed to a “groundswell of international interest”. But there’s another piece of news you probably haven’t heard: the day before the delay was announced, the U.S. and China concluded the fifth round of their roughly-annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, attended by government officials and businesspeople from both sides. As always, they issued a joint statement about the matters discussed, which for the second year in a row included FATCA, described this time in the following terms:
中美双方承诺尽最大努力在法定截止期2014年1月前就《美国海外账户税收合规法案》(FATCA)的实施达成政府间协议。为寻求FATCA实施的合作方案,美国财政部、美国国税局、中国财政部、税务总局和中国人民银行承诺在2013年夏天尽早开展下一轮讨论。 | Both sides commit to make best efforts to reach an intergovernmental agreement on the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in advance of the January 2014 deadline in the legislation. To seek a cooperative solution to the implementation of FATCA, officials from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the IRS, China’s Ministry of Finance, State Administration of Taxation, and the People’s Bank of China will hold the next round of discussions as early as practicable this summer. |
(Chinese version from the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs) | (English version from the U.S. Department of the Treasury) |
If we take this paragraph at face value, it looks like a major win for Treasury: the second-largest economy in the world — the one which everyone has been predicting for more than a year and a half would resist FATCA, and the one whose central bankers previously implied they saw it as a violation of their sovereignty — is now publicly committed to making “best efforts” to sign an IGA. Yet oddly enough, even with such an apparent victory for their narrative of “overwhelming interest” in FATCA, Treasury didn’t breath a word about it in their press release summary of the event or in their announcement of the FATCA delay. So just like Sherlock Holmes, we have a mystery on our hands: why didn’t Jack Lew’s dog bark?