Common Reporting Standard (CRS)
The Common Reporting Standard is the OECD's global standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information between tax authorities. Financial institutions identify accounts held by non-residents and report them each year, and the data is sent to the holder's country of residence.
Also called: OECD CRS · automatic exchange of information · AEOI · Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information
The OECD Council approved the standard on 15 July 2014, at the request of the G20. It sets out which financial institutions must report, which accounts and account holders are covered, the due diligence institutions must perform, and what is reported: broadly the holder's identity and tax number, the account balance, and income such as interest and dividends. Each jurisdiction enacts it in its own law, and its tax authority exchanges the data with partner jurisdictions once a year.
The first exchanges took place in 2017 among 49 early-adopter jurisdictions. By the end of 2018, 90 of the 100 jurisdictions that had committed to start in 2017 or 2018 had begun, and a 2025 OECD report counted 112 jurisdictions exchanging. The United States is not a CRS participant; it relies on its own regime, FATCA, which served as a model for the standard.
The standard looks through passive entities: for a holding company or similar vehicle with mostly investment income, the institution must identify and report the individuals who control it. Putting an account in the name of a shell company therefore does not take it out of scope. In practice CRS is why banks and other account providers ask every new customer for a tax-residence self-certification, and why a missing or implausible answer can stall KYC onboarding. For offshore banking it ended the era in which an account abroad was invisible to the home tax authority.
In practice
CRS operates through each jurisdiction's own legislation, so definitions, deadlines and penalties differ. A jurisdiction exchanges only with partners it has activated an exchange relationship with.
Example
A French resident holds a savings account in Luxembourg with a year-end balance of EUR 80,000 and EUR 1,200 of interest for the year. The Luxembourg bank reports both figures, with the holder's French tax identification number, to the Luxembourg tax authority, which sends them to France the following year.
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Commonly confused with
| Term | How it differs |
|---|---|
| FATCA | FATCA is a US law that makes foreign institutions report US taxpayers' accounts to the IRS, backed by 30 percent withholding. CRS is a multilateral OECD standard under which participating jurisdictions exchange data with each other. |
See also
- FATCAFATCA, the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, requires foreign financial institutions to identify accounts held by US taxpayers and report them to the IRS, directly or through their own government. Institutions that do not take part face 30 percent withholding on certain US-source payments.
- Offshore BankingOffshore banking is the provision of banking services, such as deposits, loans and payments, to customers who are not resident in the country where the bank and the account are located. It describes a relationship between bank and customer, not a particular place.
- Shell CompanyA shell company is a company with no significant operations, staff or physical presence of its own, often nothing beyond a registered address, that exists to hold assets, own other companies or carry out transactions. Many are legitimate, but their opacity makes them useful to launderers.
- Ultimate Beneficial OwnerThe ultimate beneficial owner is the natural person who ultimately owns or controls a customer, identified by tracing ownership up through holding companies, trusts and nominees. Twenty-five percent is the common anchor in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, but each states it differently and control is tested alongside it.
- Know Your CustomerKnow Your Customer, or KYC, is the process of identifying and verifying a customer before a business relationship starts and keeping that understanding current while it lasts, so a firm knows who it is actually dealing with. Identity verification is the first step of KYC, not the whole of it.
Go deeper
- OECD: Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters, Second Edition
- OECD Secretary-General Tax Report to G20 Finance Ministers (June 2019)
- OECD: Taking Stock of Progress on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (2025)
- Essay: Offshore Banking: What It Is, and What It Is Not