The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has announced that Papua New Guinea has officially signed the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information (CRS-MCAA) on 26 November 2024.
Papua New Guinea aims to implement automatic financial account information exchange under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) by September 2027 through this agreement.
The MCAA is a multilateral framework agreement that provides a standardised and efficient mechanism to facilitate the automatic exchange of information. It avoids the need for several bilateral agreements to be concluded. Its design as a framework agreement means the MCAA always ensures each signatory has ultimate control over exactly which exchange relationships it enters into and that each signatory’s standards on confidentiality, data protection, and appropriate use of information always apply.
The CRS is an internationally agreed standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information, endorsed bythe OECD and the Global Forum for Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (“GF”). The CRS sets out the financial account information to be exchanged, the financial institutions (“FIs”) required to report, the different types of accounts and taxpayers covered, and the customer due diligence procedures to be followed by FIs.
