VATICAN CITY — The United States on June 10 signed an agreement with the Vatican to trace American taxpayers hiding assets within the walls of the city-state, the latest step in the Holy See’s push for greater financial transparency.
The U.S. ambassador to Holy See, Kenneth F. Hackett, signed the intergovernmental agreement with Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister, bringing to an end two years of negotiations.
The deal sees the Vatican become the latest of approximately 62 countries to sign on to the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a 2010 law that allows financial information to be directly reported to authorities in the U.S.
It applies only to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, not organizations, and aims to identify people who are not annually declaring all of their foreign assets to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The information Holy See is due to hand over under the law should have already been sent to the IRS by individuals, some of whom have already been warned of the new agreement.
U.S. officials would not say how many American individuals hold money at the Vatican, but the number is believed to be rather small, perhaps in the dozens, according to the Vatican Insider.
Gallagher said it was “unquestionably a historic event.”
“As Pope Francis frequently reminds us, evading just taxes is stealing both from the state and from the poor,” he said.
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