Singapore signs multilateral deals to enhance information exchange

It reaffirms Singapore's commitment to the international standards on tax cooperation.

The Ministry of Finance announced that the city-state will be signing the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreements (MCAAs) on the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and the Exchange of Country-by-Country (CbC) Reports.

Both agreements will be signed in the Netherlands by Chia-Tern Huey Min, Singapore’s Deputy Commissioner for International, Investigation and Indirect Taxes Group of the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore.

The signing of both MCAAs reaffirms Singapore’s commitment to the international standards on tax cooperation. The MCAAs have gained recognition as multilateral framework agreements for bilateral cooperation on Automatic Exchange of Information (“AEOI”). Under the MCAAs, AEOI relationships remain bilateral – signatories to the MCAA enter into AEOI on a bilateral basis with another signatory on a mutual consent basis.

With the signing of the MCAAs, Singapore will continue to abide by the principles for establishing bilateral AEOI relationships for both CRS and CbCR.

In the case of CRS, Singapore will also want to ensure that there is a level playing field among all major financial centres. Singapore will consider engaging in automatic exchange of financial account information with regional jurisdictions which have the safeguards to ensure the confidentiality of information exchanged, and have similar agreements in place with relevant financial centres, including Hong Kong and Switzerland.

In the case of CbCR, signing the MCAA will enable Singapore to efficiently establish a wide network of exchange relationships for the automatic exchange of CbC Reports.