What Does FATCA Mean for Data and IT?

FATCA (foreign account tax compliance act) is a US law that comes into effect on 1st January 2013. It affects all financial institutions worldwide which manage US investments or have US citizens as clients; for the purposes of FATCA non-US financial institutions are Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs). FATCA permits the US to apply 30% witholding tax on any payments by US institutions to FFIs who do not cooperate with FATCA, either through non-participation or non-compliance - in short it is in the interests of almost all financial institutions worldwide to register for FACTA participation.

FATCA has enormous legal and technical implications for the data handling processes and IT systems in financial institutions.

For years, decades, business owners have bemoaned the ever-increasing burden of Health & Safety legislation, not necessarily because of the need for workplace safety, but for the bureaucratic mechanisms involved, the supervision / enforcement processes, legal considerations, employee / union relations and so on.

Creeping up on the outside, un-heeded by many directors and businesses, the Data Protection legislation has been getting teeth. In April 2010 the new Information Commissioner secured power to award fines of up to £500,000 for Data Protection breaches. At the time many, perhaps most of us, ignored this development thinking that it would only be for massively extreme cases, such large fines would not be awarded in real life.

As businesses we regularly publish information. This website gives information about our services and snippets of news about our business etc. The information we publish to the public is intended for the public and open to public scrutiny, so most responsible businesses try to publish honest, accurate information. If the information we ought to publish will cast us in a less than flattering light then we usually avoid publishing it, remaining silent being preferable to self-incrimination or deception.

Information Technology - what does it do? What do people who work in IT do, and what do they think they do? 

I'm a Chartered Information Technology Professional. I've been working with computers for three decades. I know what I do, but I increasingly have the perception that many in IT, perhaps even the IT industry as a whole, have lost their way.

What is "Information"?

What is an "Information System"?

These are key questions that the Information Technology industry, and IT practitioners, seem very unclear about. Data is not the same as Information, yet the major thrust of the IT industry is still focused on providing and supporting Data Processing Systems, rather than Information Systems. The technologies that are sold to us as IT are presented to us as if their existence is going to make some fabulous difference to our organisations and the way we work, when in reality most of these technologies simply provide for the capture and retrieval of data.