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Assoc. Dean William Byrnes’ New Book for LexisNexis is on FATCA Compliance

July 2, 2013

FACTA Compliance

Associate Dean William Byrnes’ newest book titled “LexisNexis Guide to FATCA Compliance” was published as an electronic book the week of June 24.  This Lexis book is being purchased internationally, with hard copy orders already delivered in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. FATCA is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

Professor Byrnes said, “I am deeply grateful to my subscriber base that it has so well received this new title, my fifth, in my Lexis library.  I think that Lexis’ enthusiasm is shown by the fact that it just contracted me this past week to become the author for a sixth title (on transfer pricing) that I will begin working on next week.”

“I built the international tax & financial services program with a mission of teaching professionals how to become excellent professional communicators of this robust and complex area of law,” added Professor Byrnes, “because this is what my mentors bestowed upon me – the original industry authors such as Walter Diamond, Jacobus (“Joop”) van Hoorn, Marshall Langer and Barry Spitz.

“Thus, I designed this FATCA Compliance Manual with the help of Thomas Jefferson School of Law alumni, such as Jason Fiske ’08, and several other LLM alumni, and via numerous interviews and meetings with government and central bank officials, NGO (non-government organizations) staff, large financial institution compliance officers, investment fund compliance officers, and trust company counsel. 

“It is amazing how many contributing experts that I can leverage with modern communications technology, and organize discussions and editing among multiple persons using online platforms.”

“About this book, very simply, the FATCA regulations require foreign financial enterprises to report financial information about U.S. taxpayers to the IRS.  Moreover, U.S. financial institutions must begin reporting similar financial information on foreign taxpayers to the IRS that the IRS will automatically forward to the respective foreign government.  Noncompliance leads to a 30% withholding on all payments made to the non-compliant institution, which will drive such institution out of the US market rather quickly.

“FATCA became effective on January 1, 2013, albeit withholding begins only January 1, 2014.  Though FATCA was enacted 3 years ago, there is substantial industry concern that many impacted compliance departments currently do not have access to sufficient, detailed information regarding which sources of the enterprises income are foreign and which are based in the U.S. and which of their customers are U.S. (taxable) persons (e.g. dual U.S. nationals, substantially presence U.S. tax residents).Financial institutions must look through foreign corporations and foreign trusts to determine if the owners are U.S.  taxpayers, and if so, in many circumstances report the persons to the US Treasury, under these new FATCA regulations.”

“The Manual comprises 25 Chapters grouped in three parts: compliance program (Chapters 1-4), analysis of FATCA regulations (Chapters 5 – 13) and analysis of FATCA’s application for certain trading partners of the U.S., including intergovernmental agreements (Chapters 14 – 25).”

LexisNexis® Guide to FATCA Compliance