The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore and the Ministry of Finance have proposed regulations to allow Singapore to implement the Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters.

The authorities' communication on the subject says that AEOI will come into effect on 1 January, although the OECD table that lists the 'status of commitments' puts Singapore in the category of "jurisdictions undertaking first exchanges by 2018."

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's 'automatic exchange of information' or AEOI initiative contains the Common Reporting Standard. Yesterday the OECD has released its standardised IT format for providing structured feedback on exchanged CRS information – the CRS Status Message XML Schema – as well as a 'user guide.'

From an IT perspective, with the first exchanges under the Common Reporting Standard for automatic exchange of financial account information being scheduled for September 2017, jurisdictions will rely on the CRS XML Schema for exchanging the information with each other and, in many instances, to receive information from their financial institutions.