Commissioner Koskinen Calls On Congress to Adopt Common Reporting Standard (3/15/16)

A Tax Notes Today article reports that, in a speech to the Tax Executives Institute, IRS Commissioner Koskinen called for Congress to approve the U.S. use of the Common Reporting Standard ("CRS") to replace reporting under FATCA.  William Hoffman, Koskinen Calls on Congress to Approve Common Reporting Standard, 2016 TNT 50-1 (3/15/16) [no link available].  The OECD brief explanation of the Common Reporting Standard with links is here.  The brief explanation is:

The Common Reporting Standard (CRS), developed in response to the G20 request and approved by the OECD Council on 15 July 2014, calls on jurisdictions to obtain information from their financial institutions and automatically exchange that information with other jurisdictions on an annual basis. It sets out the financial account information to be exchanged, the financial institutions required to report, the different types of accounts and taxpayers covered, as well as common due diligence procedures to be followed by financial institutions.

The TNT article indicates that the reason the IRS has not moved to the standard is that it lacks authority to do so without congressional approval.  The article says:

The IRS asked for the authority to use the CRS in Treasury's green book  2016 TNT 27-25: Treasury Reports explanation of the Obama administration's fiscal 2017 revenue proposals. Fifty "early adopter" jurisdictions have pledged to implement the CRS by January 1, 2016, starting to exchange account information from their financial institutions with their partner jurisdictions in 2017. Almost 100 more jurisdictions signed on to implement the CRS by January 1, 2017, beginning information exchanges in 2018.