What is FATCA?
The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is a US law which requires financial institutions to report to the US information about financial accounts held by US taxpayers in other countries.
The US requires all reports to be sent electronically in a format known as FATCA XML.
What is FATCA Builder?
FATCA Builder has been designed by Digimap, the developers of the Igor tax information exchange system, as a tool to help users gain an understanding of the structure of FATCA XML by crafting sample FATCA XML files by hand.
It is intended for software developers and IT experts wanting to familiarise themselves with the FATCA XML schema. It can also be used by staff in Financial Institutions who want to understand more about the XML side of FATCA reporting.
Several technical details are handled automatically for you and the most likely values for Guernsey FIs reporting to the US are pre-filled. However, all the data can be amended.
Although FATCA Builder is browser-based, it is a 'client-side' tool. This means the data you enter is only stored in your browser, and only for the duration of your session. It is completely private to you and is never transmitted to our servers.
What FATCA Builder isn't
FATCA Builder is a tool for learning about FATCA XML. It is not a reporting tool and must not be relied upon to generate valid or compliant reports.
In particular:
- It does not attempt to give guidance on what the XML means or how the various elements should be used.
- It only implements a minimal subset of the FATCA XML. There is no support for intermediaries, substantial owners, fixed-format addresses, data corrections and more besides.
- It doesn't implement all relevant validation rules. In particular, some elements which expect codes such as country codes, currency codes and other FATCA-specific codes are not checked against the permitted list.
- It is not designed to cope with XML documents containing more than a handful of Reporting FIs or Account Reports.
For further information about FATCA XML and how it will be handled by Igor, please refer to the resources linked from the IRS FATCA XML Schemas and Business Rules page and the Igor XML Reporting Guide.
Compatibility
FATCA Builder is tested and compatible with desktop PCs running the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer (version 10 or above).
Internet Explorer version 9 and below will not work.
Credits
FATCA Builder is built on Xonomy by Michal Boleslav Měchura, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The remaining code of this site is © Digimap Ltd, 2015.