Vizor AEOI Selected by Panama Ministry of Economy and Finance

Today, Vizor Ltd. announced that the Panama DGI has “gone live” with the Vizor AEOI Solution for Tax Authorities. The new Vizor system helps gather FATCA returns from financial institutions (FIs) and facilitates the production of an extract for transmission to the IRS. The most notable feature of the solution is an online portal accessible by Panamanian FIs to register and report the required account data.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires Tax Authorities in countries with a signed Model 1 Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with the US to report information to the IRS.

On April 27th, 2016, Panama and the US signed an IGA under Model 1 to improve international tax compliance with respect to FATCA. The agreement was signed by the Secretary of the Treasury and Finance, Dulcidio de La Guardia, and the United States Ambassador in Panama, John Feeley.

In addition, with Panama’s commitment to implement the automatic exchange of financial information in accordance with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS) it will also exchange information with other Tax Authorities, under the MCAA on a bilateral and reciprocal basis as of 2018. Panama intend to use the Vizor platform for the exchange of information under the new standard.

Feature Highlights of the Vizor AEOI solution:

• Financial Institution self-registration and account creation.
• Extensive validation of FATCA data, including validation against XML schema, validation against account information, GIIN validation, and many additional business rules such as those specified in the “FATCA XML version 2.0 User Guide” published by the IRS.
• Configuration options for running in “fully automated” mode; little or no manual interaction with the system is required for the Tax Authority.
• Management reports for monitoring, tracking and reviewing information within the system.
• Support for the FATCA data schema as it changes over time.
• Automated exchange of information with the IRS.

“We are proud to be helping Panama further their mission to promote tax transparency and fight against tax evasion”, remarked Conor Crowley, CEO of Vizor Software.

About Panama Ministry of Economy and Finance The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) is in charge of promoting economic policy initiatives; The programming of public investments and social strategy, the design and execution of the general guidelines and the specific tasks of the Government on the Treasury and National Treasury; The elaboration, execution and control of the General Budget of the State, Public Credit and modernization of the State, as well as the elaboration and execution of the Programming.

For more information on Panama Ministry of Economy and Finance: http://www.mef.gob.pa/