Welcome to Customer Tax Operations

The CTO team at Virgin One Account doesn't offer advice but we're here to help you understand international tax regulations and practices, as well as our commitments to them. We deliver, maintain and continually improve compliant customer tax operations.

To combat tax evasion and avoidance, many governments now investigate where their citizens hold overseas assets. So while we were initially focused on supporting the Bank's compliance with the US FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act), our activity now includes a range of operational tax regulations.

We also consider the broader response of the bank to these regulations and how we meet our obligations to them. This enables the bank to identify US or other citizens who may be liable for tax in their home jurisdiction and to report on those individuals or entities, in line with regulatory timescales. This will extend in 2016 to support the requirements of the global Common Reporting Standard (CRS).

You may be aware that the USA was one of the first countries to legislate on global tax evasion and avoidance. This is now supported by governments around the World. FATCA aims to identify and report 'US persons' responsible for paying US tax, who hold accounts and/or investments outside the US.

It requires Foreign Financial Institutions (i.e. those outside of the USA), such as RBS, to identify and report this information to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Numerous countries around the world have entered into agreements with the US, and passed local legislation to enable and mandate compliance with FATCA.

To enable the automatic exchange of tax information, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has led the development of a global Common Reporting Standard (CRS). This new agreement requires financial institutions (in participating areas) to identify customers who are tax resident in jurisdictions other than where their account is held.

The financial institutions must also report information about these customers to the relevant authority. For example, if a customer holds an account in England, but is tax resident in France, a report must be filed. To ensure we can comply with this legislation we need to have in place the appropriate policies and processes.