On 13^th of July 2016, the Cyprus Tax Department has announced that as from 2016 Cyprus Reporting Financial Institutions which do not have any US reportable accounts are now NOT obliged to submit, within the specified time limits, a ‘’nil report”.

The respective FATCA/CRS e-service is not compulsory unless they have data to submit under the FATCA Intergovernmental Agreement for the year 2015.

If a Financial Institution has already registered to the FATCA e-service but has no data to submit ,then it can proceed with one of the two choices stated below:

1.  Submit a Nil Report according to the ‘Sample Nil Report’ which is available on the tax Department’s website (www.mof.gov.cy/tax > FATCA).
2.  Request to deactivate from the FATCA e-service following the procedure described in the ‘FATCA 2016 – Registration & Data Submission User Guide’ (page 5, 1st sentence) which is also available on the tax Department’s website.

Note that your registration to the Government Gateway Portal ‘Ariadni’ DOES NOT create an obligation to submit the Nil Report for FATCA purposes. Therefore a Financial Institution with no data to submit may still remain registered to the Ariadni Portal, however if the intention is not to submit a Nil report the Financial Institution should deactivate its account from the FATCA e-service.

Furthermore, in respect of the 2016 year the reporting deadline for FATCA purposes has been extended from 15^th of July 2016 to 22^th of July 2016.

All content prepared by KPMG Cyprus.