Canada and Switzerland have entered into an agreement which will commence in 2018 for the automatic exchange of information.

Names of 350 Canadians with offshore companies and offshore accounts were revealed as part of the Panama Papers tax haven data leak.

The long awaited instructions for Form W-8BEN-E were finally posted on the IRS website on June 24, 2014.

The CRS which stands for Common Reporting Standards is in essence an automatic annual financial information exchange tool for tax authorities.

United States citizens and "green card" holders who live abroad have long been subject to U.S. tax reporting obligations.

Canada is now implementing a new international standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information between tax administrations referred to as the common reporting standard.

In the weeks to come, we can expect to read and hear plenty more about this mammoth data dump of over 11.5 million documents.

At a recent STEP conference roundtable, the CRA stated that, from January 2014 to April 2016, the CRA had received 2,984 calls (812 of which were from potential informants) and 333 written submissions.

Most are not impacted and read them out of curiosity. However, for some Canadian residents, there may be cause for concern, but also, a solution.

As headlines are talking about an unprecedented leak of secret papers and data involving murky and even illegal offshore financial transactions, governments across the world began investigating possible financial wrongdoing...

In what is becoming a familiar headline, the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has announced another leak of offshore tax haven information.

When it comes to tax law, governments have two main arrows in their quiver.

Canadian residents are generally required to annually file a special information return for any year that they held, at any time in that year, "specified foreign property" that had a cost exceeding $100,000.

Since the global economic crash of 2008, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the U.S. has been trying to find other ways to generate income and much needed revenue.

The Canadian hedge fund industry has grown dramatically over the past decade. Where previously there were only a few participants in the Canadian hedge fund space, today there are several highly skilled Canadian hedge fund managers - many of which are ready to export their expertise globally.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), enacted by the US Congress in 2010, becomes operational on July 1, 2014.

On July 1, 2014, a Canada/U.S. intergovernmental agreement (IA) came into effect requiring financial institutions in Canada to begin identifying "U.S. person" account holders (for example, U.S. citizens and U.S. residents) for the purposes of disclosing specific information to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

The Canada Revenue Agency (the "CRA") has launched roughly 100 audits into taxpayers named in the Paradise Papers offshore tax leak, according to documents tabled in Parliament.

If you’re an American living abroad, you already know that you must report your ‘foreign' financial account to the U.S. government annually.

To date, Canada’s response to the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine has been the imposition of sanctions on Pro-Russian elements of the former Ukrainian government and Eastern Ukrainian separatist factions linked to Moscow.