In expat circles, private bankers, and “Twitter-certified” tax specialists, the same reflex keeps coming back: as soon as we talk about asset protection or offshore, everyone pulls out the same keyword like a mantra: CRS.
The Common Reporting Standard has become a sort of totem. Some refuse a country solely because it is “CRS compliant”. Others imagine that by finding a jurisdiction “outside CRS”, they have become invisible. Both are wrong.
The truth is simple: CRS is just one tool among many others in the states’ arsenal of surveillance and information exchange. Focusing solely on it means ignoring the rest of the states’ arsenal.
If you really want to live with “as little state as possible”, you must stop seeing CRS as the main enemy, and start understanding the complete ecosystem of information exchange agreements and mass surveillance.
CRS: useful to know, dangerous to overestimate
CRS (Common Reporting Standard) is the OECD-led initiative that requires banks and financial institutions in most countries to automatically transmit information about non-resident accounts to their home states.
In practice, if you are a tax resident of a CRS country with an account in another country that also applies CRS, the information from that account (balance, interest, holder, sometimes movements) is automatically exchanged between the two countries, every year.
Yes, it’s a global tax surveillance tool. Yes, it’s intrusive. Yes, it’s a problem for those who want to keep part of their financial life off the radar.
But no, it’s neither the only problem, nor the most dangerous one. And treating it as the center of your strategy is a major strategic error.
Before CRS, there was worse: FATCA
When talking about information exchange, we must start with the elephant in the room: the United States.
Well before CRS, the United States imposed their own system on the entire world: FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). The idea is simple: if a foreign bank doesn’t cooperate and doesn’t provide information about “US persons” (American citizens, green card holders, etc.), then it gets heavily penalized on all its dollar operations.
Result: almost the entire banking planet capitulated. Bilateral agreements piled up, and today, FATCA gives the United States massive access power to their taxpayers’ banking data, everywhere on earth.
The disturbing detail: the United States doesn’t apply CRS. They demand transparency from others, but refuse to play the same game. It’s a power relationship, not “symmetrical” cooperation.
Conclusion: if you only look at CRS, you’re already missing the biggest predator in the system – and the model that inspired much of what followed.
TIEAs, bilateral conventions and obscure agreements
Then, there’s everything that doesn’t carry a “sexy” acronym like CRS or FATCA but does the real work behind the scenes:
- TIEA (Tax Information Exchange Agreements): bilateral tax information exchange agreements between two countries, often signed with so-called “offshore” jurisdictions. They allow country A to request targeted information about a taxpayer from country B.
- Bilateral tax conventions: these treaties “to avoid double taxation” almost systematically include information exchange clauses. France–Switzerland, France–Emirates, Switzerland–USA, etc. Behind the nice pretexts, these are also tax intelligence channels.
- Specific sectoral agreements: certain states or blocs (EU, OECD…) create targeted mechanisms for certain types of income, people or structures (trusts, transparent companies, etc.).
What matters for you: every time two states sign a paper together, you need to check if there’s an information exchange clause in it. CRS is just one standard among a galaxy of bilateral, regional or thematic texts.
Beyond banking info: administrative assistance and collection
Many people stop at information exchanges. They tell themselves: “ok, my home country will know I have such account, but it won’t be able to do anything, I’m gone.” Again, this is an underestimation of the system.
There are mutual administrative assistance conventions where two countries (or more) commit to:
- exchange information on request or automatically;
- warn each other in case of suspicion of fraud, evasion or non-declaration;
- help each other with collection: concretely, country A can ask country B to help it recover a tax debt from a taxpayer settled on its territory.
This is a higher level of cooperation: we’re no longer just talking about “surveillance”, but concrete execution. Your former country doesn’t just watch you – it can use your new country as an armed wing to come get the money directly where you now live.
If you’re seeking to protect yourself from a predatory state, these collection assistance treaties are often more important to monitor than CRS itself. A country without CRS but with aggressive collection assistance for your nationality can be much more dangerous than a “classic” CRS country but non-cooperative on execution.
Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, Fourteen Eyes: surveillance well beyond banks
The tax authority is just one piece of the puzzle. Modern reality is global surveillance that goes far beyond the banking framework.
Five Eyes type alliances are coalitions of Anglo-Saxon countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) that massively share intelligence: communications, metadata, internet traffic, signals, etc.
From this historical base, extensions have been added:
- Nine Eyes: addition of several European countries (including France, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway… depending on sources and periods);
- Fourteen Eyes: even broader, notably including Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, and others.
These alliances are not small discussion clubs. They are networks of massive sharing of digital data and intelligence: interceptions, communication data, internet surveillance, sometimes cross-referenced with financial and administrative data.
Clearly: while everyone panics about CRS, you have entire structures dedicated to sucking up and cross-referencing your digital traces, your movements, your communications, your connections, and potentially your financial flows.
For a human who really wants to reduce the state’s footprint in their life, ignoring these alliances is a much more serious error than underestimating CRS.
Examples of toxic combinations between states
Let’s look at some typical patterns:
- France + EU countries: France is integrated into a dense network of tax conventions, mutual collection assistance directives, automatic exchange (CRS type), and additionally it’s involved in broader intelligence alliances. Getting out of France fiscally doesn’t happen “just” by changing domicile.
- USA + rest of the world: the United States has FATCA, a massive network of tax conventions and a planetary intelligence machine. They consider their citizens taxable for life, wherever they live. An American who only looks at CRS is shooting themselves in the foot.
- “Offshore” countries + TIEA agreements: some historical tax havens have signed a multitude of TIEAs. They don’t necessarily have CRS, but they can deliver information on request, country by country, in case of suspicion.
The idea is not to draw up a blacklist here, but to make you understand one thing: what matters is not a single acronym, it’s the combination of agreements that your countries (origin + destination) have adhered to.
Why focusing on CRS is a strategic error
Worrying about CRS is legitimate. Dismissing it would be naive. But making it the alpha and omega of your protection strategy is dangerous.
Because:
- CRS only covers financial information declared by institutions;
- there are countless parallel channels (TIEA, tax conventions, administrative assistance agreements, collection directives, police and judicial cooperation);
- intelligence alliances like Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes go far beyond the tax field;
- the modern state functions by signal aggregation: banks, telecoms, platforms, travel data, cloud, etc.
Building an “anti-state” strategy by simply avoiding a few CRS countries is like believing you escape a drone by just changing sidewalks.
What you really need to monitor if you want to become stateless
If you want to seriously regain control, you must change your reading grid. Instead of asking “Is this country CRS?”, start asking questions like:
- With which countries does my home country have complete tax conventions (including information exchange)?
- Do my home country and my destination country have a mutual collection assistance agreement?
- Are the jurisdictions where I put my money or my company part of Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes or similar alliances?
- What types of data (banking, telecoms, cloud, travel) are legally accessible and shareable between these countries?
- Where are my main risks really located: tax, criminal, banking compliance, fund blocking, etc.?
It’s this global vision that allows you to really reduce state pressure on your life, instead of simply moving the problem from one box to another.
On Stateless.to, we map the entire battlefield
On Stateless.to, we don’t just repeat “CRS = bad, non-CRS = safe”. This kind of simplification is reassuring, but it puts you in danger.
Our approach: treat all surveillance and information exchange mechanisms:
- CRS, FATCA and other automatic exchange standards;
- TIEA and bilateral tax information exchange conventions;
- administrative assistance and tax collection conventions;
- Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes type intelligence alliances;
- countries that cooperate aggressively, and those that still resist.
We maintain an updated database on these subjects, accessible on Stateless.to, to allow you to build a strategy based on real data, not Telegram myths.
CRS is an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the final boss. If you want to seriously move toward a stateless life, you must look at the entire system of state surveillance and cooperation. That’s exactly what we do for you, continuously, in our articles and in the Stateless.to database.