The Common Reporting Standard: what your UAE bank reports

The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is how tax authorities swap account information automatically. It was written by the OECD in 2014 and more than 100 countries have signed it, the UAE among them since April 2017. UAE reporting financial institutions — banks, custodians, fund and asset managers and life insurers among them — work out which of the accounts they hold are reportable and send those to the Ministry of Finance once a year; where the account holder's declared country is one of the UAE's exchange partners, the Ministry passes the record on to that country's tax authority.

One line on the form decides it: the country you say you are tax resident in. The bank does not simply take that at its word. It checks what you declared against the rest of your file, and the Ministry's own example of a failure is someone certifying as a UAE tax resident while the bank holds a UK address for them — the bank is expected to go back and ask. Certifying anything you knew, or should have known, was wrong carries a fine of AED 20,000.

Americans are on a separate track. From a UAE bank's point of view the United States is not a CRS destination at all: US-reportable accounts go to the IRS instead, under FATCA and a UAE–US agreement in force since 2014. Either way, if your circumstances change — a move to another country, say — the reporting is meant to follow the new information once the bank has it, which is why they ask you to tell them.