VATICAN CITY/UNITED STATES
Forbes
Robert W. Wood
In his annual Christmas messages to more than one billion Catholics, the Pope may have left out something: offshore account compliance. Maybe, but the U.S. Treasury is more than happy to fill in the blanks. Just before Christmas, the Holy See reached the substance of an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) to hand over American account details. FATCA is everywhere, and the fact that the Treasury Department now trumpets the Vatican deal should come as no surprise.
The Holy See is not part of the European Union and should not be confused with Vatican City. The Holy See is the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic church. The Vatican Bank has had its share of corruption kerfuffles in the past. Indeed, the Vatican Bank isn’t exactly transparent, and released its first annual report in 2013.
With transparency comes compliance, and there may well be some accounts held for American clergy that will need to be cleaned up. If accounts are held through entities or via proxies, they still could require disclosure. Presumably the ultimate beneficiaries of the accounts will be known to someone, and that means reporting.
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