Asia and the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) in 2025

Updated: August 2025

Privacy in the Modern Age

This article isn’t about how to avoid the CRS, or how to hide money in an offshore banking jurisdiction. Those days are over. And we are not promoters of anything illegal.

But it’s not illegal to value your privacy either. And especially in an age when our data (including spending habits) is tracked and sometimes even used against us, there are legitimate purposes for pursuing privacy in financial matters.

Today we live in a world where privacy is being whittled down to become almost non-existent. And where our lives and the laws that we live under are increasingly being driven by unelected international bodies that may have a different agenda to what is in the individuals best interest.

It is refreshing to know that there are some countries that, up until this point at least, have declined to join the Common Reporting Standard (CRS).

A quick note that this article doesn’t address FATCA, which is the data sharing mechanism that affects US citizens.

What is the Common Reporting Standard?

The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) was developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2014.

The CRS is a banking and data sharing mechanism between member countries. If you are a resident of one member country, and you have a bank account in another member country, this will be reported back to your country of residence.

The information shared includes personal details like your name, address, tax ID number, as well as bank account numbers, balances, details of transactions and so on.

Who is on the CRS List in Asia?

There are currently around 120 countries that have signed for the automatic exchange of information via the CRS.

In our part of the world, this includes:

China (including Hong Kong)

Indonesia

Japan

South Korea

Malaysia

Singapore

Taiwan

Thailand

Which countries in Asia are not on the CRS?

You may have noticed a few names missing from the above list. Indeed there are some notable exceptions, here they are:

Cambodia

Laos

Myanmar

North Korea

Philippines

Vietnam

Practicalities of Administering CRS reporting

Its worth mentioning that even though a country may be a member of the Common Reporting Standard in theory, how that plays out in practice may be a different story.

Reporting under the CRS does have its challenges. Not all countries have the electronic systems that are capable of tracking and automatically sharing this level of financial data at scale.

And while some countries may have signed up to the CRS, how willing are they to actually carry out the data sharing? There may be other priorities at hand that the banking sector has to apply its limited resources to first.

Its not out of the question for the OECD to strong-arm countries into following their directives. In some cases, some countries may want to appear to be complying so that they don’t receive backlash at the international level. While in reality, its just not a major concern for them.

How this reflects in the level of data that is or isn’t shared is hard to say. And it is fair to say that whatever weaknesses in reporting capability may exist today, probably will diminish in the future.

Final Thoughts

It’s worth re-iterating that we do not support using the shortcomings of the CRS as a tool for any illegal purposes. If you try to hide money, you probably will be caught at some stage.

That all said, many of us still do value our privacy.

And privacy is something that is worth fighting for, otherwise one day it will be gone.

No one wants to live in 1984.