AG

Separately, the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information (Amendment) Bill, 2026 extends the CRS depository-account definition to cover accounts holding central bank digital currencies and specified electronic-money products. This is a tax-transparency reporting-scope change: reporting financial institutions will need to identify and report CBDC- and e-money-linked accounts for CRS exchange purposes ahead of a possible 2027 international compliance evaluation. The obligation falls on the institutions holding such accounts, not on issuers of the underlying digital-money products, and no statutory penalty figure or confirmed legal effective date has yet been located, pending Gazette text.

Read together, the two developments describe divergent trajectories: the currency union's own CBDC infrastructure ambitions are being scaled back, while the national tax-reporting perimeter for CBDC- and e-money-linked accounts is simultaneously being widened. The underlying Digital Assets Business Act, 2020, administered by the Financial Services Regulatory Commission, remains the general licensing instrument for digital-asset businesses in Antigua and Barbuda, but no stablecoin-specific provision within that Act was examined or confirmed this cycle.

Outlook

Confirmation of the AEOI amendment's legal effective date, via Gazette publication, would resolve the remaining uncertainty about when the extended CRS reporting obligation for CBDC and e-money accounts takes effect. Separately, whether the ECCB's redirection of CBDC development toward the Fast Payment System and CAPSS pilot results in a revised or future CBDC framework bearing on Antigua and Barbuda, or whether DCash-style CBDC development is abandoned altogether in favour of the Fast Payment System, is a trajectory worth tracking independently of the tax-reporting change.

This tabled bill is not Antigua and Barbuda's first move in this area. It follows two AEOI amendment Acts enacted in 2025 that had already widened CRS scope prior to this bill, suggesting a multi-year, incremental pattern of legislative expansion of the jurisdiction's automatic-exchange architecture rather than a single discrete reform. Read in that light, the 2026 bill's crypto-asset focus represents the natural next increment in a sequence that has already been underway, extending the automatic-exchange net to cover a category of assets, crypto, that has historically sat outside CRS-style reporting frameworks in many jurisdictions even where conventional financial-account reporting was well established.

If enacted as currently understood, the bill would create reporting duties running from crypto-asset service providers, potentially including those licensed under the Digital Assets Business Act 2020 and registered with the FSRC, to Antigua and Barbuda's tax authority, for subsequent automatic exchange of crypto-asset transaction information with CRS/CARF treaty partners. This would represent a meaningful new compliance obligation layered on top of the existing DABA licensing framework, though the precise interaction between DABA licensing categories and the proposed CARF reporting duty has not been clarified in the sourced material this cycle.

No primary statutory text, Gazette publication, or Hansard record of the bill's tabling or progress was retrieved this cycle; the development rests entirely on secondary trade-press reporting. This is a genuine sourcing gap rather than a substantive uncertainty about whether the bill exists, and it should be read as such.

Outlook

The bill's passage through the Antigua and Barbuda Parliament is the single most important variable to track for this module going forward. Antigua and Barbuda's tabling is broadly consistent with, rather than ahead of, the general pace among AEOI-participating jurisdictions moving toward the OECD's indicative 2027 first-exchange timetable for CARF implementation, so neither acceleration nor delay relative to that international benchmark can currently be assessed with confidence. Retrieval of the bill's primary text, once available, would allow a substantial upgrade in the precision of this assessment, including clarification of which FSRC-licensed digital-asset business categories fall within the proposed reporting duty.