Hong Kong’s Legislative Council voted on Wednesday, Nov. 4, to pass a bill that puts the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) into the city’s tax law, the government said in a statement that day.
The measure, formally the Inland Revenue (Amendment) (Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework and Amended Common Reporting Standard) Bill 2026, gives legal force to a schedule the government laid out in May. Crypto service providers in Hong Kong must begin gathering the user information CARF calls for in 2027. The Inland Revenue Department (IRD) will then start sharing that data with partner jurisdictions in 2028.
The same bill adopts the OECD’s updated Common Reporting Standard (CRS), which extends to digital financial products and tightens due diligence and reporting. Those changes apply from 2028, and the first exchanges under the revised standard follow in 2029.
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A Short Runway
Passage came about eight weeks before the 2027 collection year opens, by Unchained’s count. According to the IRD’s CARF page, the registration portal is still being built, while the reporting schema and the list of partner jurisdictions are still to be published, so firms with a Hong Kong nexus will be building their systems against rules whose technical details have not yet been released.
Who Has to Report
The OECD released CARF in 2023 so that tax authorities could trade information on crypto transactions automatically once a year. The IRD’s page says the service providers covered include exchanges, brokers, dealers and crypto ATM operators with a Hong Kong connection, and that reportable activity covers crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto trades plus transfers, including to external wallets.
Hong Kong will exchange information on a reciprocal basis and subject to data confidentiality and security, according to the government. The government said the IRD will publish guidance and has formed a dedicated team to answer industry questions.
Christopher Hui, the Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, said adopting the standards is “crucial to maintaining Hong Kong’s reputation as an international financial and commercial centre.” He added that alignment “will reinforce the confidence of crypto-asset service providers, financial institutions and digital asset users in operating and making long-term investments in Hong Kong.”
The bill was gazetted on May 22 and introduced in the legislature on June 3, following a public consultation that ran from December 2025 to February 2026. Hong Kong has swapped financial account data with partner jurisdictions under the original CRS every year since 2018.
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