What a group request asks of a Swiss financial institution
Switzerland applies FATCA under a Model 2 agreement. Accounts whose holders have consented are reported directly to the IRS through the IDES gateway. For US accounts without consent, the financial institution reports aggregate numbers only – and those aggregates are what the IRS follows up with a group request through administrative assistance.
The request lands at the FTA’s Division for the Exchange of Information in Tax Matters (SEI), which asks the institution concerned for the account information. The deadline is ten days. For every account in scope the institution delivers a data package: account opening documentation and statements as a PDF, the case data as an SEI-XML file, and the reportable data as a FATCA XML file. PDF and SEI-XML stay with the FTA, which uses them to decide whether the criteria for administrative assistance are met; the FATCA XML is the file that goes on to the IRS.
Ten days is not much time to build XML by hand. That is the entire point of this module: the data is collected once – in the supplied Excel workbook or directly in the application – and both files come out of it, consistent with each other and checked before they leave the house.