We examine the benefits and challenges associated with recent advancements in automatic tax information exchange agreements to improve tax compliance at the top of the wealth distribution. Since 2016, Colombia has received information on foreign accounts held by its citizens in the United States and 103 other countries through the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). We merge FATCA and CRS reports with personal tax return microdata on domestic and foreign income and wealth from 2016 to 2021. First, we outline recent trends in the likelihood of Colombians voluntarily disclosing foreign assets to their authorities and the declared amounts. Second, we juxtapose self-reported wealth against data obtained from CRS and FATCA. Third, we investigate the role of CRS and FATCA in facilitating the enforcement of wealth and income taxes.

This paper uses account data leaked from an Isle of Man bank to study the effectiveness of automatic exchange of bank information agreements (AEOI). We establish three sets of results. First, we find that AEOI treaties do not legally cover a large share of assets held offshore. Second, we observe that banks in charge of reporting appear to correctly identify most reportable accounts and to communicate this information truthfully to tax authorities. The quality of reporting is better for individual accounts than for company accounts, either because of complexity or because of non-compliance by the bank. Third, we find evidence that clients of the bank who were more at risk of being reported on preemptively closed their accounts, potentially circumventing the AEOI reporting process. This paper sheds light on the design flaws of AEOI agreements, and provides new evidence on how sophisticated individuals ultimately avoided this new transparency shock.

Countries worldwide committed to automatically exchanging financial account information under the CRS, including many less developed countries (LDCs). It is still unclear if the scheme improved tax compliance, however, in particular in the weaker enforcement context of LDCs. In this project, we merge CRS reports received by the South African Revenue Service to income tax returns to shed light on this question. We show that foreign wealth by South African residents is concentrated at the top of the income distribution. The findings further indicate that CRS reporting lowers tax evasion - but a significant compliance gap prevails. This is consistent with incomplete enforcement: Misreporting of taxpayer identifiers often prevent successful matches of CRS reports to tax returns; and conditional on matching, discrepencies between taxpayers' self-reported and CRS-reported foreign income do not impact observed audit risk or audit adjustments - suggesting that CRS reports do not yet effectively inform audit processes.

This paper studies the effects of the 2017 multilateral automatic exchange of information (AEOI). Leveraging rich tax data and difference-in-differences designs, I document significant positive tax compliance behavior. The AEOI caused 107k taxpayers (2% of all) to participate in the Swiss amnesty. Together, they disclosed CHF 35.2 billion Swiss francs—more than 5% of GDP. This static macro effect persists at the micro level: Once an evader enters the amnesty, their wealth increases by around 55% on average and remains at this higher level. Lastly, I show that tax evasion is widespread in Switzerland and more evenly distributed than elsewhere.