An analysis of a recent FACTA enforcement development by John Richardson (posted with permission).

Welcome To 2023 – A Year Of Heightened FATCA Enforcement

On December 30, 2022 US Treasury released Notice 2023-11. The broad purpose of the Notice is to prescribe conditions that would allow non-US banks to temporarily avoid a designation of “significant non-compliance” under the FATCA IGAs. It is important to note that Notice 2023-11 is NOT simply a “stay of execution”. It is a “stay of execution” that is conditional on both non-US banks and their governments participating in a significant escalation of FATCA enforcement on US citizens who live outside the United States.

The purpose of this post is to comment on and analyze the provisions of Notice 2023-13 which strongly incentivize non-US banks to purge themselves of existing US citizen clients. In Part 2 I will explain why I believe that non-US banks may be forced to close the accounts of all their US citizen customers.

Prologue And Summary Of The Issue

Through a combination of FATCA (“Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act”) found Chapter 4 of the Internal Revenue Code and the FATCA IGAs (the mechanism for countries to comply with FATCA) the United States has created conditions where US citizen customers are a burden and risk to non-US banks. These provisions have created conditions that threaten punitive financial sanctions on non-US banks who cannot notify the IRS of a US citizen’s Social Security Number. Generally this is because the US citizen has lived abroad for many years and does NOT have a SSN. This situation has created worry for the banks and for their US citizen customers. The fact that the US citizen does NOT have a SSN is NOT relevant to the reporting obligation imposed on the bank. To be clear: The FATCA IGAs mean that non-US banks can easily be in “significant non-compliance” for the failure to comply with something that is impossible to comply with. (continued – see lower left)