Mark Matthews Quoted in Reuters, Overseas Tax Dragnet Refocuses on Country Partnerships

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A crackdown on overseas tax evasion is fast changing shape as officials move to implement it via country-to-country agreements, rather than by enforcing a single law for all financial institutions.

The transformation over the past nine months of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, is largely seen by both advocates and detractors as the most pragmatic way to implement the law, which takes effect in 2014.

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Treasury is now negotiating with at least 40 countries for FATCA tax information-sharing pacts, tax lawyers said.

A Treasury FATCA negotiating team is scheduled to meet with foreign financial businesses on Thursday in Paris and on September 26 in Singapore on tax information exchanges.

Bilateral agreements to implement FATCA are "a workaround," said Mark Matthews, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale and former head of the criminal investigation division at the Internal Revenue Service.

"It is clearly less airtight and bulletproof. But the (FATCA) statute as written was wholly unachievable," he said.

Click here to read the entire article on changes to FATCA before its implementation in 2014.