HONG KONG: Hong Kong has gazetted legislation to establish provisions to automatically exchange financial account information with other territories to support international tax collection efforts. The Inland Revenue (Amendment) (No. 2) Ordinance 2017, which will enter into force on July 1, will enable Hong Kong to implement automatic exchange of financial account information in tax matters (AEOI) in line with the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard more effectively, the Government said.
“The Amendment Ordinance [ensures] that Hong Kong can preserve the financial account information from the second half of 2017 for exchanging with other jurisdictions. This enables the effective implementation of AEOI without introducing an undue compliance burden to financial institutions,” the Government said. The Government explained: “The Amendment Ordinance does not alter the privacy and data protection requirements on AEOI under the Inland Revenue Ordinance. Hong Kong would only conduct AEOI with jurisdictions which have signed dedicated exchange agreements with us and have fulfilled the OECD’s standard and relevant safeguards for protecting data privacy and confidentiality of the information exchanged.” “For a member of the public, if he is not a tax resident of any jurisdictions outside Hong Kong, financial institutions in Hong Kong will not report his information to the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) under this regime.”
