Anyone opening an account or securities deposit abroad today rarely still assumes that this will remain hidden from the German tax office. The reason is not some isolated investigative measure, but an automated procedure that has been running for years: the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS), implemented in Germany through the Financial Accounts Information Exchange Act (Finanzkonten-Informationsaustauschgesetz, FKAustG). Banks and other financial institutions in more than 100 participating states report annually, without any specific suspicion being required, which accounts they hold for persons resident abroad – including account balances and investment income. This article explains how the CRS works, exactly what data flows, how it differs from the American FATCA regime, and what this means in practice, particularly for people planning to relocate or emigrate. This is expressly not about tax avoidance, but about transparency obligations that everyone with a foreign connection should be aware of.
What Is the Common Reporting Standard (CRS)?
The Common Reporting Standard was developed by the OECD in cooperation with the G20 states and published in 2014. It is a globally uniform standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information between the tax authorities of different states. The basic idea: financial institutions – banks, certain insurers, custodians, investment companies – determine the tax residence of their customers when an account is opened and in the ordinary course of business. If a customer is identified as tax-resident abroad, the institution reports certain account data to its own national tax authority, which in turn forwards this information automatically – that is, without a specific request – to the tax authority of the state of residence.
Legally, the automatic exchange in Germany rests on several building blocks: within the EU, on the correspondingly amended Directive on Administrative Cooperation (Directive 2011/16/EU); vis-à-vis third countries, on the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement of 29 October 2014 (CRS-MCAA) in conjunction with the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, as well as further bilateral or multilateral agreements. At national level, this is anchored in the Financial Accounts Information Exchange Act (FKAustG), in force since 2015. German financial institutions have been collecting the required data since 2016; the first automatic reports to the Federal Central Tax Office (Bundeszentralamt für Steuern, BZSt) and, from there, to partner states, were made in 2017.
The German Implementation: The FKAustG
The FKAustG transposes the CRS into national law. Section 1 FKAustG defines the scope of application: it covers the automatic exchange with EU Member States, with third countries that have signed the multilateral CRS agreement, and with states with which Germany has agreed a corresponding exchange on another contractual basis. Section 2 FKAustG, headed “Common Reporting Standard” (Gemeinsamer Meldestandard), specifically governs which details must be transmitted – these include, among other things, the account holder’s name, address, tax identification number(s), date and place of birth, the account number and account type, the name and identifier of the reporting financial institution, the account balance or value at year end, and – depending on the type of account – interest, dividends, proceeds from disposals, or other income.
The obligations of the financial institutions themselves – such as the due diligence duties involved in determining tax residence through what are known as self-certifications by account holders – are set out in sections 3 and 9 to 20 FKAustG. Under sections 4 and 5 FKAustG, the Federal Central Tax Office is the competent body for receiving and forwarding the data: it receives the reports from domestic financial institutions, forwards the data relating to foreign residence to the relevant partner states, and conversely receives data on German taxpayers from their foreign banks. Which states actually participate in the exchange for a given reporting year is published annually by the Federal Ministry of Finance in its own list of exchange partner states.
What Data Is Actually Reported?
The following overview summarises the main categories of data transmitted per reportable account under section 2 FKAustG and the underlying CRS:
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| Category | Example details |
|---|---|
| Personal data | Name, address, date of birth, place of birth |
| Tax identification | Tax identification number(s) of the relevant state of residence |
| Account data | Account number, account type, name and identifier of the financial institution |
| Account balance | Balance or value of the account at the end of the calendar year |
| Investment income | Interest, dividends, income from insurance contracts, proceeds from disposals (depending on account type) |
| State of residence | State whose tax authority receives the data on the basis of the reported tax residence |
Importantly, individual transactions such as transfers are not reported in detail – the CRS is not a payment-tracking system. What is reported is year-end balance data and aggregate income totals. That, however, is enough to allow the state of residence to check whether these capital gains and assets have been fully declared in the tax return filed there.
How Many States Participate – and Who Does Not?
According to the OECD, more than 100 states and territories now exchange financial account data under the automatic exchange of information standard; the OECD itself puts the number of actively exchanging jurisdictions for the 2025/26 reporting period at 113 (as of 2026), while a total of 126 states are committed to the automatic exchange of information. These include practically all EU Member States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, numerous classic offshore financial centres such as the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands, and – with varying lead times – states that only joined the system in recent years. Which states are actually Germany’s partner states for a specific reporting year follows from the annually updated list of exchange partner states for the FKAustG, published by the Federal Ministry of Finance.
The United States does not participate in the CRS. The reason is straightforward: with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), the US already has its own, older system of automatic information exchange, and has not joined the CRS to date.
The Difference from FATCA
FATCA and the CRS are often mentioned in the same breath in practice, but they work differently. FATCA is US law dating from 2010 and is implemented vis-à-vis Germany through a bilateral agreement that Germany and the United States concluded on 31 May 2013 as a so-called Model 1 agreement. It requires German financial institutions to identify accounts held by US persons and report them, via the BZSt, to the US tax authority, the IRS. The CRS, by contrast, is a multilateral procedure in which – apart from the United States – the great majority of states with relevant financial centres participate, and it is based on a uniform reporting standard developed by the OECD rather than on a multitude of individual bilateral agreements.
A further practical difference lies in reciprocity: while the CRS is fundamentally based on mutual data exchange under a uniform standard, the reciprocity envisaged in the FATCA agreement is limited in practical implementation – the US transmits considerably less information to partner states such as Germany than it receives itself. For German nationals with US accounts, the FATCA regime therefore represents a separate reporting obligation existing alongside the CRS, which should not be overlooked when taking stock of foreign accounts.
What This Means in Practice for Emigrants and Germans with a Foreign Connection
For people moving abroad, or already living there, the central misconception is that moving away automatically ends all transparency towards the German tax authorities. In reality, it depends on which state an account is reported to the relevant bank as the state of residence – and on whether any tax liability towards Germany still exists at all:
- As long as unlimited or limited German tax liability still exists – for example in the year of the move, where a domicile or habitual residence in Germany continues, where domestic income arises after the move, or under the extended limited tax liability for emigrants to certain low-tax jurisdictions under section 2 of the German Foreign Tax Act (Außensteuergesetz, AStG) – account data can still flow to the German tax administration even after the move.
- If tax residence is not updated with the bank, or is updated late, it can happen that an institution continues to report an account as belonging (also) to Germany as the state of residence, even though the actual centre of the person’s life has already shifted.
- If an account is kept open in Germany while the person is now resident abroad, the German bank in turn reports the data to the new state of residence – transparency thus works in both directions.
The CRS therefore does not replace a tax return, but it makes discrepancies between declared and actually existing foreign accounts considerably easier for the tax administration to detect than in the past. For the practical planning of a move abroad, this means: anyone putting their account and asset structure in order should assume from the outset that relevant data will sooner or later automatically become known to the competent tax authority – whether German or the new foreign one.
In Addition: Reporting Obligations for Foreign Interests under Section 138(2) of the Fiscal Code
In addition to the CRS data exchange, which originates with the financial institutions themselves, domestic taxpayers are also subject to a separate, active notification duty under section 138(2) of the Fiscal Code (Abgabenordnung, AO). This provision was significantly tightened in 2017 as part of the Tax Evasion Prevention Act (Steuerumgehungsbekämpfungsgesetz) – a legislative response to the so-called Panama Papers. However, it does not primarily concern bank accounts, but rather business and corporate-law connections abroad: notifiable matters include, among others, the establishment or acquisition of businesses and permanent establishments abroad, the acquisition or change of interests in foreign partnerships, the acquisition or disposal of interests in foreign corporations from a shareholding of 10 percent or acquisition costs of more than EUR 150,000, and the first-time acquisition of a controlling or determining influence over what is known as a third-country company. The notification is generally made together with the tax return, but no later than within 14 months of the end of the relevant tax assessment period.
For merely holding an account abroad, there is no separate, equivalent active reporting duty on the part of the account holder towards the tax office – here, transparency operates primarily through the banks’ automatic CRS data flow and through the pre-existing duty to declare all resulting investment income fully in the tax return. However, anyone who additionally holds company shares, interests or permanent establishments abroad should keep section 138(2) AO in mind as a separate transparency obligation to be checked in parallel.
Practical Example: Account Data After Moving Abroad
The following example is purely fictional and serves for illustration only; it does not describe a real case or a real person. A German national moves her domicile to Portugal but keeps a securities deposit account with a German bank as well as a newly opened account with a Portuguese bank. As long as she has neither a domicile nor a habitual residence in Germany, and no extended limited tax liability under section 2 AStG applies, the German bank will in future report the data on the German securities account to Portugal as the new state of residence, while the Portuguese account is generally subject to Portuguese tax supervision and is not automatically reported to Germany. The position would be different if she failed to notify her new residence to the German bank, or if she remained subject to limited tax liability – for example due to continuing domestic income: in that case, account data could continue to flow to the German tax office as well. This example shows how closely the CRS reporting channels are tied to correctly documented tax residence – and how important it is to establish this promptly and completely when moving abroad.
What This Article Is Not About
It should be expressly clarified at this point: this article describes transparency obligations and reporting structures that apply in international tax law – it is not a guide to tax avoidance or to circumventing reporting obligations. Anyone holding assets abroad remains obliged, regardless of the CRS, to declare the resulting income fully and accurately. The benefit, rather, lies in knowing one’s own reporting and transparency obligations in order to avoid surprises from the outset – for instance, from automatically transmitted data that does not match one’s own tax return.
When Is Legal Advice Worthwhile?
Whether, and to what extent, account data still flows to the German tax office in a specific case depends on several interlocking factors: the timing and clean documentation of the move, continuing or extended limited tax liability, the correct self-certification provided to the banks involved, and – in the case of business interests abroad – the additional notification duties under section 138(2) AO. Particularly where several of these factors coincide, for instance on a move to a lower-tax country or where accounts are held in parallel in several states, an early legal assessment is worthwhile before the reported data and one’s own tax filings diverge.
Johannes Fiala is a lawyer experienced in international tax and asset-related questions concerning relocation abroad, emigration and cross-border account structures. The Fiala law firm has published extensively on international tax law and supports clients in correctly classifying their cross-border account and asset arrangements in light of the CRS and FATCA reporting obligations, and in fully meeting their existing transparency obligations.
Are you planning a move abroad, or would you like your existing foreign accounts assessed in light of the CRS reporting obligations? Contact the Fiala law firm to clarify your individual situation before automatically transmitted data and your own tax filings diverge.
