The Cayman Islands have announced that they are pushing back by two months the 2017 deadlines for Cayman Financial Institutions (FIs) to notify their status to the Cayman Islands Tax Information Authority (Cayman TIA) and file first reports for Common Reporting Standard (CRS) purposes via the Cayman Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) Portal.

The Cayman AEOI Portal is currently unavailable, but is expected to come back online by mid to late March 2017 to accept notifications by Cayman FIs of their CRS status. The CRS return submission functionality on the AEOI Portal is expected to be available from around mid to late April 2017. The Cayman TIA has therefore provided the following extensions to give Cayman FIs more time to fulfil their notification and reporting obligations under CRS for the first year, without incurring penalties or other sanctions:

• CRS Notifications: notifications will be accepted up to 30 June 2017 (extended from 30 April 2017).
• CRS Reporting: the deadline for filing a first CRS report has been extended to 31 July 2017 (from 31 May 2017).

These extensions only apply to CRS and therefore the FATCA deadlines for first notifications of reporting FI status (30 April 2017) and FATCA reporting (31 May 2017) for 2017 remain unchanged.

It should be noted that Cayman Islands Regulations implementing CRS include specific requirements that need to be met in relation to the CRS notifications, which differ to those that apply under FATCA. All Cayman FIs are required to notify their CRS status to the Cayman TIA, even if they have no reportable accounts.

For more on this story go to: http://www.elexica.com/en/legal-topics/tax/100317-cayman-islands-extends-crs-notification