134 countries now swap account data automatically: where your home-country account belongs on a Dutch return

Almost everyone who moves to the Netherlands still has an account back home, because the flat has not sold, because parents still send money, or simply because closing it never reached the top of the list. On 1 September the Ministry of Finance published a set of figures that says exactly where that sits administratively: the tax authority recovered 139 million euro over last year from undeclared income and assets, working through 1.495 signals, twelve and a half per cent more than the year before, of which 522 files ended up corrected at an average of 266.000 euro each. The money came from three places: 66,5 million from foreign legal entities, 40,6 million from international data exchange and 16,3 million from people who came forward themselves.

• 134 countries now exchange financial account data automatically, the Netherlands among them. (source 1)
• The 522 corrected files averaged 266.000 euro each, tax and penalties together. (source 1)
• 16,3 million came from taxpayers disclosing first, which the release counts as its own line. (source 1)
• The stated focus is foreign bank accounts, anonymous structures and digital financial products such as crypto-assets. (source 1)
• New European rules on exchanging crypto data appear in the same material as a tool that will widen the picture further. (source 1)
• A tax resident of the Netherlands declares worldwide assets, not only the Dutch part. (source 2)

One thing needs saying plainly. Holding an account in your home country is entirely legal, and leaving money in it is legal too. What goes wrong is something else: a Dutch tax resident declares worldwide assets, and the assets column is read off the balance on the first of January. So the job is not to move money back but to check one thing, namely whether that account appeared on last year's return. If it did not, the voluntary-disclosure line in the official breakdown exists for precisely this situation, and it is cheaper than being found through exchanged data.

The sum worth doing yourself is one of scale. Divide 139 million by 522 and each corrected file averages 266.000 euro, which is not a parking fine and suggests the cases being opened are not about a few hundred euro of interest. Put your own numbers in: the balance sitting in the account, the interest or dividend it throws off each year, and how many years you have been resident here. That tells you roughly which end of the range you sit at, and whether one hour of professional advice is worth buying before anything else. How to declare it is set out on the tax authority's own pages.

Hokimi field note: screenshot the balance of every overseas account as it stands on the first of January, one image a year. If you ever do file a correction, the tax itself is never the slow part; reconstructing old balances year by year is.