On 1 March 2024, New York Governor Hochul signed into law the amended LLC Transparency Act (“Act”). Enacted on 23 December 2023, the Act underwent significant revisions as a result of the agreement between the Governor and the legislators. The Act requires that all limited liability companies (LLCs) formed under the New York Limited Liability Company Act (“LLC Act”) or seeking authorization to do (or doing) business in New York State disclose information about certain of their beneficial owners, or submit a statement that the entity qualifies for an exemption from this requirement. All LLCs in existence prior to 1 January 2026 must comply with the Act before 1 January 2027.

With the new year comes the 1 January 2024 effective date of the Corporate Transparency Act, which will require approximately 32.6 million US entities to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). On 28 September 2023, FinCEN published proposed regulations modifying the BOI Reporting Requirements, which are found in the CTA’s implementing regulations.

The United States Tax Court’s recent decision in Farhy v. Commissioner prevents the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from assessing and collecting penalties from taxpayers for failure to file Form 5471, Information Return of US Persons With Respect to Certain Foreign Corporations.

Treasury and the IRS issued temporary relief procedures in Notice 2023-11 for a foreign financial institutions (FFI) that is subject to a Model 1 intergovernmental agreement (IGA) jurisdiction.
Model 1 FFIs that follow the procedures set forth in the Notice will not be in significant non-compliance with their obligations under an applicable Model 1 IGA solely because of a failure to report a required US taxpayer identification number (TIN) in relation to “preexisting accounts”.

On 8 December 2022, the United States and Croatia signed their first convention for the avoidance of double taxation and the prevention of tax evasion with respect to taxes on income. With this development, Croatia becomes the latest, and the only remaining, European Union member state to sign its first tax convention with the US.

On 2 November 2022, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court upheld the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s ruling that information can be exchanged to investigate criminal tax matters pursuant to an information exchange request by a foreign tax authority. However, use of the information exchanged for non-tax enforcement purposes is impermissible.

In its press release published on 26 October 2022, The Financial Crimes and Enforcement Network announced that its Acting Director renewed and expanded its Geographic Targeting Orders beginning on 27 October 2022 and ending on 24 April 2023 (with certain exceptions).

This webinar on 17 January 2023 will explore key questions and examples of the state of play of crypto (or digital) assets across a number of jurisdictions and the tax impact and rules on employee compensation as well as considerations from a wealth management perspective.

On 29 September 2022, FinCEN released the final regulations regarding Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirements which implement the beneficial ownership information reporting provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act.

On 8 December 2021, Treasury issued Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to allow the public to review and comment on proposed regulations to implement the beneficial ownership information reporting provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act. Passed on 1 January 2021, the CTA imposes on so-called “Reporting Companies” the obligation to report to Financial Crimes Enforcement Network information regarding their “Beneficial Owners” and company “Applicants.”