Common Reporting Standard (CRS) Now Effective in Thailand

Common Reporting Standard (CRS) recently came into effect in Thailand (you may refer to the announcement by the Revenue Department here) and we thought to share some of our experience with you. With Thailand implementing CRS later than some other countries, the benefit is we have accumulated a lot of operational knowledge and experience from helping to implement CRS globally the past few years, so we are able to use that experience in making your CRS implementation a smoother process.

Here are a couple of lessons which we have learnt from the CRS implementation in other countries:

1. It is extremely important to fully understand the CRS requirements.
2. Data quality is equally important.
   
   

When CRS requirements are not fully understood, or data quality is poor, this results in problems/issues as illustrated below.

Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence

Recommendation

Some financial institutions choose to learn as they go. However, at each point when they realise that their procedures are not fully compliant with the regulations, additional effort to remediate will be required (e.g., performing another round of review of accounts, resubmission of CRS reports, etc.). This is costly in terms of time and resources required.

Our recommendation is to understand the requirements and get your processes and systems right from the very beginning. This includes:

1. Ensuring that relevant staff are properly trained
2. Having policies and procedures in place so that there is a standardised process
3. Using technology to speed up processes (e.g., validation of CRS self-certification forms, generation of XML files for reporting), enhance data quality and mitigate risk (e.g., check the correctness of your customers’ Tax Identification Number (TIN) so as to reduce questions from tax authorities)
   
   

How we can help

Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence

For more details on our tax solutions, you may refer here: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/mi/products/tax-solutions.html

If you require assistance or would like to connect with us, please feel free to reach out to Shawn.Yip@spglobal.com