There is lots going on following the July 1, 2014 implementation date for key aspects of the Foreign Account Tax Act (“FATCA”). Many countries have negotiated Intergovernmental Agreements (“IGAs”) to provide for the ‘smoother’ domestic application of this U.S requirement.

The following graphic was generated with data parsed from the FATCA – Archive and it shows the countries with IGAs in place or close to conclusion

, and was graphed using “R”.

The data was parsed from the FATCA – Archive using Ruby and the Mechanize gem as follows:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'
require 'open-uri'

agent = Mechanize.new
page = agent.get("http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/treaties/Pages/FATCA-Archive.aspx")
 doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page.body)
 doc.css('#ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_ctl05__ControlWrapper_RichHtmlField div div a').each do |linkz|

if linkz.text =~ /\A(.*?)(\s\(.*?\))\Z/
 puts $1 + "   
thirty one gifts
 ,Signed IGA"
end

end

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page.body)
doc.css('#ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_ctl05__ControlWrapper_RichHtmlField div p~ div li').each do |linkz|

if linkz.text =~ /\A(.*?)(\s\(.*?\))\Z/
 puts $1 + ",Substantive IGA"
end

end