Australia's CARF commitment: what 2027 data sharing means for your offshore holdings

For a long time, an overseas exchange felt like a blind spot. If you traded on a platform based outside Australia, the ATO had no direct line to that data, and plenty of people assumed it never would. That assumption is running out of road.

In the 2025-26 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, released in December 2025, the government confirmed it will implement the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, known as CARF, along with a domestic crypto reporting regime. Reporting is expected to begin in 2026, with the first international exchanges of data targeted for 2027. The exact start still depends on the legislation passing, so treat the dates as the plan rather than a locked calendar. The direction, though, is settled: the offshore gap is closing.

What CARF is

CARF is the OECD's answer to a problem the older Common Reporting Standard left open. The CRS made banks report account information across borders, which is why offshore savings accounts stopped being invisible years ago. But it was built for traditional finance and never covered crypto. CARF fills that gap with a standard designed specifically for digital assets.

More than 50 jurisdictions have committed. The OECD counts 58 targeting the first exchanges in 2027, with a further group, including Singapore, the UAE, Hong Kong, and the United States, aiming for 2028. Once it's running, it works like the CRS did for bank data: your information follows you home.

How the reporting works

Under CARF, Reporting Crypto-Asset Service Providers do the reporting. That covers exchanges, brokers, and certain wallet and transfer operators. They have to identify their users and each user's country of tax residence, then report standardised transaction data once a year to their local tax authority. That authority passes the data on to the user's home-country authority.

So if you're an Australian resident trading on an exchange based in a participating jurisdiction, that exchange reports your activity to its own regulator, which sends it to the ATO. The reverse also happens: Australian providers report on their foreign-resident users for exchange back out. It's a web, not a one-way street.

One limit worth being precise about. CARF applies to activity that runs through a service provider. Pure self-custody, moving your own crypto between wallets you control with no intermediary, generally sits outside the reporting net. But the moment that crypto touches a reporting provider, a transfer to or from an exchange, for example, it comes back into scope. CARF is not a claim that every private wallet is now visible; it's a claim that the intermediaries are now reporting.

This sits on top of what the ATO already does

CARF isn't the ATO's first source of crypto data. Since 2014-15, the ATO has run a crypto data-matching program that collects account and transaction data from Australian designated service providers and matches it against tax returns. That program is domestic: Australian platforms, Australian data.

CARF adds the cross-border layer, and the new domestic regime tightens local reporting further. The government's own framing is that this will enhance the ATO's oversight of crypto transactions by Australian residents. The data the ATO holds is about to get wider and more international, at the same time.

What to do before it starts

The uncomfortable part of reconciliation is that it looks backward. When the ATO starts receiving CARF data, it can compare what an exchange reported against what you declared, including for years you may have treated as settled. The fix is to get your full history in order now, not after the first data exchange.

• List every exchange and platform you use, onshore and offshore, and pull a complete transaction history from each while you still have access.
• Reconcile that history into a single position: every disposal, swap, and staking reward, valued in AUD at the time.
• Check your past returns against that record. If something was missed, a voluntary correction is a far better position than waiting for a data-matched discrepancy.
• Keep the records. Australia expects you to hold them for five years, and CARF makes that record the thing your declared figures are checked against.

This is exactly the kind of consolidation software is built for. Kryptos connects your Australian and overseas exchanges and wallets, normalises everything into one AUD transaction history, and produces the gain/loss position you report. For how disposals, staking, and DeFi are taxed here, see our Australia crypto tax guide, and you can sketch a number with the Australian crypto tax calculator. If you also run a self-managed fund, the reporting bar is higher again, which we cover in our post on SMSF crypto compliance. For the mechanics of CARF itself and its EU counterpart DAC8, our CARF and DAC8 guide goes deeper.

About the author

Deepak Pareek

Head of Tax & Accounting - Kryptos