A Belgian agency ruled that the government’s sharing of Americans’ financial information with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service, the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes] under a US law violates European data protection laws.
The US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, requires reporting of foreign bank account information to the US agency.
The Belgian Data Protection Authority issued the ruling Thursday, saying sharing of this data in accordance with FATCA violated provisions in the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and it gave the Belgian government one year to bring its data-sharing into conformity with the GDPR.
- The authority initially blocked the sharing of data in 2023, in a case brought by the Accidental Americans Association of Belgium. A Brussels Market Court reversed the decision and sent it back to the authority later that year.
- The Association of Accidental Americans President Fabien Lehagre said his group welcomes the decision, which he said will stop the data transfers, but he decried the decision to give the government a year to comply. “Accidental Americans” are people who hold US citizenship by virtue of their birth but are established overseas.
- “Data protection cannot accommodate a political or administrative timetable,” he said. “Transfers must cease immediately.”
Yeah, but the US subsidiary does not deal with that US citizen, the EU bank does. The US subsidiary might even know that that person is the customer of the EU bank, but might not know the details of their bank account, like one bank doesn’t necessarily know the details of other bank accounts. If you were a sanctioned individual and the EU bank deals with you, the US subsidiary would have to cut the EU bank off, but that does not mean that the EU bank has to transfer all data about all accounts to the US subsidiary beyond whether they deal with you, and even that is only if you are on “the list”.
I mean it works like this at EU banks, they have a responsibility to give data to the tax office of the country you are tax resident of, but not all tax offices even in the EU. If I’m an Italian citizen residing long-term in Spain, and thus being a tax resident of Spain, the (likely Spanish) bank will have to provide all banking details to the Spanish tax office. The Italian tax office however has no such right, even though I’m an Italian citizen.
Spain and Italy: you’re most likely correct.
When US is involved: there are special rules. Every country in Europe has an agreement with US that they’ll write their own law that compels all local banks (not only banks which does business in US) to tell US authorities about any customer that US considers to have some form of connection with US. This case appears to be about the Belgian edition of this set of laws.
Huh, Wikipedia has a blurb about the Belgian process of implementing this law, back in 2014-2015: “the Belgian Ministry of Finance orally confirmed that the IRS agreed to delay the FATCA reporting deadline. Belgian financial institutions now will have until the 10th day following the publication of the Belgian FATCA law into the Belgian official gazette to report their 2014 FATCA information to the Belgian tax authorities. The Belgian FATCA law is expected to be voted on before 2015 year-end.” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act], the section about ‘Delays in implementation of IGAs’.
