New and far-reaching registration obligations, including for trusts under the International Tax Compliance (Amendment) Regulations 2025

Despite very little publicity, amendments to the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), were made by the International Tax Compliance (Amendment) Regulations 2025 (the Regulations). The Regulations took effect on 16 July 2025.

The Regulations make a number of changes to the CRS and FATCA reporting regimes. Of most pressing concern is a requirement imposed on UK reporting financial institutions or specified non‑reporting financial institutions to register with HMRC. Further, and despite the lack of significant publicity about this requirement:

• The deadline for registration is 31 December 2025, and
• Penalties (initially of up to £1,000) can apply for failure to register (albeit no penalties will apply if HMRC is satisfied that there is a reasonable excuse for failure to do so).

Those familiar with CRS and FATCA reporting regimes will know that trusts themselves are frequently (even typically) financial institutions for these purposes, including (very broadly) because the trust may hold financial assets which are subject to discretionary management, or because they hold financial assets and have a professional trustee. Indeed while these rules will apply to other structures which are considered financial institutions, this note focusses only on trusts.

Accordingly trustees of each and every trust need to know now (if they did not before) whether they are or are not a financial institution for these purposes, and must then act accordingly.

Where financial institutions have already registered for CRS/FATCA, no registration is required.

In many cases, however, trusts and other structures which are considered to be financial institutions will not yet have registered for CRS / FATCA, because they have no reportable accounts / account holders (for instance because they have no non-UK resident equity or debt interest holders – typically the trust beneficiaries).

In other cases, trusts with reportable accounts / account holders will not have had to report because they have relied on another financial institution (for instance a professional trustee) to report on their behalf. Any of these structures which is considered to be a financial institution for CRS and FATCA purposes will now need to register.

In most cases the information which is now required to be included upon registration will have already been provided to HMRC, e.g. under the Trust Registration Service (TRS).

HMRC has set out guidance, which provides links to more information, and explains the process of how to register, plus provides a link to its portal which should be used to register using a Government Gateway user ID (and password). The guidance also details the information which is needed for the process and what must be included in the registration, which in practice is fairly limited.