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The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is the single global standard for the collection, reporting and exchange of financial account information on foreign tax residents.
Banks and other financial institutions use the CRS due diligence rules to review their accounts, identify those held by non-residents and report the relevant information to the ATO. That information will then be exchanged with the participating foreign tax authorities of those non-residents. In parallel, the ATO will receive eligible financial account information on Australian residents from other countries' tax authorities. This will help ensure that Australian residents with financial accounts in other countries are complying with Australian tax law and act as a deterrent to tax evasion.
In Australia, the CRS Reportable Financial Institutions (RFIs) include banks and other deposit taking institutions, custodial institutions, investment entities, and specified insurance companies.
Reports from Australian RFIs include data from January to December and are due annually, by 31 July in the following year.
The CRS is part of a broader suite of international measures aimed at combating tax avoidance through more comprehensive exchanges of information between countries (for example, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Country-by-Country Reporting (CbC).
For further information refer to the Websites and documents below.
Latest news
27 August 2024
From September 2024, all files that pass the initial File Validation will receive a Status Message within 24-72 hours of lodgment. A Status Message will be returned to the point of lodgment.
The Status Message is being implemented to provide lodgers with more timely information regarding the outcome of lodgment processing. Further information, including error code descriptions, is available here.
12 November 2023
New validation rules have been added concerning the reporting of accounts in Uninhabited Jurisdictions and Australian External Territories. These changes are reflected in the latest version of the CRS specification.
10 July 2022
The SBR CRS site has been deprecated and all relevant links to the SBR site have been removed. All artifacts that was hosted on the SBR CRS site will now be hosted here on the Software Developer CRS specification
22 October 2020
Testing of the CRS XML Schema version 2.0 (use CRS User Guide Version 3.0) for BDE is now available via the External Vendor Testing Environment (EVTE).
18 February 2020
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released an updated CRS schema to be used from 1 January 2021.
15 May 2019
Contact element
A name and contact phone number or email address should be included in the Contact element contained in the message header (MessageSpec). This will allow us to contact you if there is an issue with your file.
28 March 2019
Updates to validation rules
Over the next few months we will be updating a number of validation rules for 2018 CRS Reports due 31 July 2019.
The updated validations will trigger ‘error’ messages and require correction before a successful lodgment can be accepted.
Your 2018 CRS reports will need to conform to the following validation rules:
- Namespaces must be provided in your CRS files. Refer page 290 of the CRS XML Schema User Guide
- The Account Balance must be zero if an account was closed during the reporting year
- The ReportingFI ResCountryCode element must be AU
- The BirthDate element cannot be greater than the current date or before 1900
- Controlling Person/s must be provided when
- Account Holder = Organisation & Account Holder Type = CRS101
- Controlling Person/s must be omitted when
- Account Holder = Organisation & Account Holder Type = CRS102 or CRS103
Reporting details for trusts
If the RFI is a trust the ReportingFI element must contain the details of the trust including the trust name, address and TIN (TFN or ABN) as opposed to the trustee. This ensures that the record of lodgment is correctly recorded against the trust.
13 December 2018
To pass validation, the XML schema files must not contain certain invalid characters. If your XML file contains one or more of the below characters, replace them with the following predefined references.
| Character | Description | Replace with |
| & | Ampersand | & |
| < | Less Than | < |
| > | Greater Than | > |
| ‘ | Apostrophe | ' |
| “ | Quotation Mark | " |
The below combinations of characters are not allowed. If your XML file contains one or more of the below characters, you will need to remove them.
| Character | Description |
| -- | Double Dash |
| /* | Slash Asterisk |
| &# | Ampersand Hash |
26 September 2018
In order to pass validation, XML Schema files must not contain the CorrMessageRefID. This element is not used for CRS and the file will fail validation if it is included. For more information on correcting or deleting information previously provided, refer to page 253 to 271 of the CRS User Guide.
11 May 2018
There is a 250MB limit for lodgment of CRS files. If your CRS file exceeds this size you will need to split the file (message) into 250MB sections. Refer to the CRS user guide (page 270) for further information on splitting files.
Use the ‘Warning’ element in the lodgment to indicate the file reference when splitting files. For example,‘1 of 10’, ‘2 of 10’, '3 of 10' and so on.
19 February 2018
In order to pass validation, all CRS XML Schema files must contain MessageRefID and DocRefID elements with the following format:
- AUReportingYearAUSendingCompanyINUniqueReference
The components of the above format are:
- Sending Country Code - must be, AU
- Reporting Year (the year in which the data relates) - for example, 2017 for a report period ending 2017-12-31
- Receiving Country Code - must be, AU
- Sending Company IN - for example, ABN, GIIN or TFN
- A unique string of characters the reporter can use to make the file unique - for example, UniqueReference.
The MessageRefID and DocRefID must be unique in space and time.
The Sending Company IN and Reporting FI elements must be identical in the report.
20 December 2017
Wrapper header
CRS files must contain the appropriate wrapper header for lodgment via Bulk Data Exchange (BDE) channel.
To view the BDE wrapper header guidance see Bulk Data Exchange common information artefacts
Testing
Testing for BDE is available via the External Vendor Testing Environment (EVTE).
7 September 2017
Lodgment of CRS reports will be limited to one reporting entity per report. The report should contain all of the entities reportable accounts. The first report is due by 31 July 2018.
17 March 2017
The OECD Automatic Exchange of Information Portal has now been updated to reflect Australia’s Domestic Reporting Format.
Websites and documents
For further information refer to the websites and documents below.
- CRS Specification
- Bulk Data Exchange common information artefacts
- CRS Legislation and Guidance Material (External Link)
- OECD Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters (External Link)
- CRS User Guide and Schema (External Link)
Contact info
Feedback can be sent to DPO@ato.gov.au