FATCA News and Information

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sent this bulletin at 01/14/2015 05:21 PM EST

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FATCA News & Information

January 14, 2015

Issue Number: 2015-4

Inside This Issue

Alert! FATCA Schema Namespace Issue
Alert! FATCA Schema Prohibited Characters
Alert! FATCA Digital Certificate Format

1. Alert! FATCA Schema Namespace Issue

An issue has been identified in which FATCA XML documents fail schema validation when default namespaces are used. This is a temporary issue that will be fixed in February 2015. In the meantime, to ensure your FATCA XML document does not fail validation, please do not use default namespaces. Use namespace prefixes for all elements. You will receive another alert after this issue has been fixed.

2. Alert! FATCA Schema Prohibited Characters

In addition to characters that are prohibited/restricted based on standard XML schema best practices, there are three additional characters (apostrophe (‘), hash (#) and double dash (--)) that will not be accepted in any FATCA XML documents as they are considered a security threat. The FATCA IDES Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) have been updated to address all character restrictions. Additionally, the schema reference documents are in the process of being updated to include these restrictions. You will receive another alert once the revised documents are posted. To prevent file error notifications, please ensure your files do not include any of these characters.

3. Alert! FATCA Digital Certificate Format

Before you begin the IDES enrollment process, each entity should obtain one valid digital certificate issued by an approved certificate authority (CA). IDES will ONLY accept digital certificates issued by an approved CA. Supported formats for the digital certificates are:

• Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER) binary X.509
• Privacy Enhanced eMail (PEM) ASCII (Base-64) encoded X.509
IDES will convert digital certificates received in DER format to Base64 for storage and retrieval.

If a digital certificate is not in DER or PEM format, use Windows 7 to convert your digital certificate to DER or PEM as follows:
1. Open the digital certificate with a .CRT filename extension
2. Select the Details tab
3. Select the “Copy to File…” button
4. In the Certificate Export Wizard, select the format you want to use as either “DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER)” or “Base-64 encoded X.509 (.CER)”.

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Issue Number: 2015-4

Inside This Issue