You’ve just been named by your financial firm as a responsible officer under the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA for short.
Should you hand in your two-week notice, take the job in stride, or brace– and protect yourself – from hefty operational and legal liabilities?
Those are the decisions and options now faced by potential FROs, or thousands of high-ranking officials working outside the US, who have been tapped by their financial institutions to help comply with the controversial FATCA legislation.
FATCA Responsible Officers: Be Careful, Very Careful
What could be the consequences to a Responsible Officer making a false certification under FATCA?
Seems to me lots of money spent in set-up — there must be something to this implementation of FATCA IGAs in Canada and other foreign countries. Wonder how many new “Responsible Officers” job titles and opportunities have been added to the world’s foreign financial institutions, corporations and where that FRO would stand in the pecking order of Board of Directors, CEO, CFO, etc.
Watch out… So many failure opportunities that could lead to this…
LOL, at the least.
The run-up to FATCA must be like the run-up to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX as we called it) when I was still in the work force. Extensive; Expensive!!
We could dispense with all the expence and nonsence if we had a tax system that was set up simply to gather revenue to operate the government. Their motives are;
1. Keep track of where every citizen lives.
2. Keep anyone from being successful as an individual.
3. Keep politicians in campaign cash, whilst they diddle with the laws making them expire often enough to get paid to extend them until the next election year.
4. Keep 4.1 billion dollars flowing into the bank accounts of tax preparers and tax lawyers as well as several million government employees as democrat voters.
They could revolutionize the system and make it run smoothly in a month, but they have rejected the FairTax and kept the same old Marxist system.
If I’m asked for my Social Security number from an FFI here it is: USF-UC-KOFF.
Don, that may be a duplicate SSN, belonging to someone else.
LOL, Don and Calgary!
Being a compliance officer under FinCEN may not be worth the risk. FinCEN is trying to levy a fine of $5 million against former chief compliance officer for MoneyGram, a money transfer company similar to Western Union. If FinCEN is successful with its prosecution, a comment in this Reuters article suggests that the compliance officer function will become a consulting job:
“However, the personal risk calculus for compliance officers, especially those in top leadership roles, changed dramatically with the disclosure that Haider faces a multi-million dollar penalty.
“It means that the only viable world for well-intentioned compliance professionals will be consulting, where you hold none of the risk personally,” a top compliance officer at one of the largest banks operating in the United States said.
The executive said that these are “scary” times, and that if FinCEN issues a massive penalty to Haider, it “better be backed by a fact set chock full of willful, borderline-illegal acts.””
The article also mentions that the executive spoke anonymously for fear of retribution (by FinCEN?).
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/02/financial-regulations-moneylaundering-idUSL2N0NO0QA20140502