The authorities in the British Virgin Islands have written the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's 'Common Reporting Standard' into the Mutual Legal Assistance (Tax Matters) Act 2003, giving it legislative form at last.

The Government does not intend to issue guidelines on the subject because it feels that the OECD's existing commentaries and the CRS Implementation Handbook are so extensive as to make further guidance superfluous. 

The offshore law firm of Maples & Calder writes: "The principles under the BVI CRS legislation are very similar to FATCA [the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act 2010] and the BVI US and UK FATCA legislation, although there are some important distinctions.  For example, while US FATCA focused on citizenship and tax residency, CRS only focuses on tax residency. Given the extensive overlap with the BVI UK FATCA regime, it is proposed that this regime should be subsumed into CRS by 2017."