FAQs: Tax Residency and Reporting

Tax residence is defined as the resident country’s local tax laws and therefore may vary from country to country. In general, tax residence is the country in which you live. Special circumstance may cause you to have tax residence in more than one country at the same time, e.g. dual residence. You may check the OECD website on the respective countries / jurisdictions’ Tax Identification Number (TIN) structure and rules. Please confirm your tax residency with your tax advisor.

As a Financial institution, RHB is legally required to establish the tax residency status of all its customers, even if you are a local tax resident in Malaysia. However, at present, IRBM would not require the reporting of your details (i.e. a local tax resident) for CRS purposes, unless you self-declared that you are a tax residency.

You may leave the TIN blank but you will need to indicate the reason for not obtaining a TIN. A list of reasons will be pre-printed in the Self-Certification Form (e.g. minor, student, housewife, country does not have TIN, etc.).

Yes. It is an offence under section 113A of the Malaysia Income Tax Act, 1967 if any person, in making a self-certification, provides incorrect information in the Self-Certification Form. Such offence is punishable with a fine (between RM20,000 and RM100,000) or imprisonment (for a term not exceeding 6 months) or both.

You can check your order status at the order log / status of the online trading platform. A contract note will be sent to you via normal mail or email on the following trading day.

You are required to provide the bank the tax residency information of the trust's relevant parties (i.e. the settlor(s), the trustee(s), the protector(s) (if any), the beneficiary(ies) or class(es) of beneficiaries, and any other natural person(s) exercising ultimate effective control over the trust, as required).

FATCA is a US Legislation requiring RHB to identify US Persons and report in line with the FATCA regulations, based on the citizenship of the customer. Whereas, CRS requires RHB to identify the tax residency of all our customers and to report information to IRBM on customers who are having tax residency of another country.

Notwithstanding that if you have already provided information under the United States Government’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act ("FATCA"), you are still required to provide the additional information for CRS as these are governed under different regulations /jurisdiction with different requirements.

Malaysia has adopted a wider approach for CRS, which requires financial institutions to collect information of all customers with non-Malaysia tax residency. RHB will only report information of customers who are tax residents in other jurisdictions that have signed bilateral agreement with Malaysia.

For any changes of tax residency details or CRS status, the customer is required to inform and update RHB by providing a new Self-Certification Form to RHB within 30 days from the date of change.

Under CRS, the details to be reported include customers' tax residency details and financial account information (i.e. balance/value and the total amounts of payment credited to their respective financial accounts).

No. The reportable information will be made available to IRBM. IRBM will then share these information with the respective countries’ tax authorities based on the customer's reported foreign tax residency(ies) information and provided that the country has signed the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with Malaysia. It is expected that Malaysia’s selected partnering countries will have a strong rule of law in place to ensure confidentiality of information exchanged, and will not subject to unauthorised access or misuse.