Opening a Bank Account in The Bahamas: a Risk-Based Duty, and No List of Documents
The Financial Transactions Reporting Act, 2018 is the statute a bank applies when you walk in, and it names no documents. Section 7(1)(a) requires a financial institution to identify the identity of a facility holder by means of verifying reliable, independent source documents, data or information, and section 7(3) requires it to take account of its own risk assessment for that customer and relationship. Where the risks identified are low the institution shall conduct simplified due diligence; where there is a suspicion of activity related to an identified risk, enhanced measures are required. Beneficial owners with a controlling interest must be identified, and trusts are opened up by name - settlor, trustees, protector, beneficiaries or class of beneficiaries, and the trust's accountants and tax advisers. Separately, every new individual account carries a Common Reporting Standard self-certification of the holder's residence or residences for tax purposes. What the Act does not do is tell you which papers to bring: that is each institution's own policy, and it is a fact about the institution rather than about Bahamian law.
At a glance
- Statutory standard
- Reliable, independent source documents, data or information
- Prescribed document list in the Act
- None
- Beneficial ownership threshold for a corporate facility holder
- A controlling interest
Section 7(2). The Act does not express the threshold as a percentage at this point.
- Tax residence question
- Asked at account opening, by self-certification
Common Reporting Standard, Section IV paragraph A, enacted as the Schedule to the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information Act, 2016.
- Exchange control, in the Act itself
- A power to make regulations, and nothing else
Chapter 360 contains no definition of resident, no limit and no threshold. The Controller of Exchange is the Central Bank.
Requirements
- Identity verified against reliable, independent source documents, data or information
- Identification of anyone acting on your behalf, and verification of their authority
- Information on the purpose and intended nature of the relationship
- A self-certification of your residence or residences for tax purposes
- For a trust or a company, identification of beneficial owners with a controlling interest
In detail
The law sets a standard, not a checklist
Several countries covered here prescribe the documents a bank must take - an identity card, a utility bill, a certificate of residence. The Bahamas does not. Section 7(1) tells a financial institution to identify the facility holder by verifying reliable, independent source documents, data or information; to identify and verify anyone purporting to act on the holder's behalf and to verify their authority; and to understand and where appropriate obtain information on the purpose and intended nature of the relationship, including the ownership and control structure. Section 7(3) then requires the institution to take account of its own risk assessment of that customer, and section 7(4) makes simplified due diligence mandatory where risks are low and enhanced due diligence mandatory where there is suspicion. What a particular bank asks a particular newcomer for follows from that assessment, and is a fact about the bank.
Two questions about residence, neither of them Bahamian
A new account holder will be asked where they are resident for tax purposes, under the Common Reporting Standard enacted as the Schedule to the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information Act, 2016. The answer drives reporting to other jurisdictions, and the Standard's own indicia - a residence address, a mailing address, telephone numbers, standing instructions, a power of attorney, a hold-mail instruction - are all about somewhere else. Because The Bahamas has no income tax, the question cannot be answered with The Bahamas in the way it is answered elsewhere, and a newcomer should expect to be asked for documentary evidence of the residence they do claim.
Country-level policy
Every citation on these pages goes to laws.bahamas.gov.bs, and the question of what that site is has a statutory answer. The Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023, in force since 1 May 2023, repealed and replaced the 1975 Act of the same name. Under it the Law Reform and Revision Commissioner maintains an electronic database of the existing revised edition with amendments incorporated, and that database, made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure, shall be deemed to be an official version of the law. The Attorney-General, not the Minister, now authorises pages into the edition by Law Revision Order and appoints the day a revised edition comes into operation; and under section 28 the Government Printer may, at the Commissioner's request and with the Attorney-General's approval, print a reprint of any Act with its amendments incorporated, which is deemed an authentic copy as at the date of printing. The practical consequences are three. The chapters are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher says it stood at 31 December 2016, so every amendment since sits in a separate Act. Pages inside one chapter can carry different Law Revision Orders, and some are still at the original service of 2001. And the site itself says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street - a disclaimer flatly narrower than the statute that deems the database official.
Exceptions by origin
No exceptions recorded
Nothing we have read treats any nationality differently for this topic. The rule above applies to everyone.
What the law says
«identify the identity of a facility holder by means of verifying reliable, independent source documents, data or information»The wording is the publisher's; identify the identity is how the Act reads.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«Where the risks identified are low, the financial institution shall conduct simplified due diligence measures unless there is a suspicion of activities related to any identified risk in which case enhanced customer due diligence measures shall be undertaken.»A duty, not a discretion, in both directions. The institution's own risk assessment under section 5 decides which applies.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«the settlor, the trustees, the protector (if any) and any other natural person or persons exercising effective control over the trust»Paragraph (c) extends identification to the trust's regulated agents and service providers, including anyone acting as manager, accountant, investment adviser or tax adviser.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«the Reporting Financial Institution must obtain a self-certification, which may be part of the account opening documentation, that allows the Reporting Financial Institution to determine the Account Holder's residence(s) for tax purposes»About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«Without prejudice to the generality of the
powers conferred by subsection (1) of this section Finance
Regulations may be made for the purpose of controlling,
buying, selling and dealing in gold, foreign currency,
foreign securities and foreign exchange.»Known to be out of date. The Chapter is at the Original Service of 2001 throughout and its latest amendment in the margin is 5 of 1987.
Section 3(1) is the power itself: the Minister may by Order make such regulations, referred to in the Act as Finance Regulations, as he may deem expedient in respect of any matter or thing connected with exchange control. The substance is all in those Regulations.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«Controller of Exchange, and the functions of that office»The full sentence, interrupted in the printed column by its own marginal notes, reads: There is hereby established the office of Controller of Exchange, and the functions of that office shall vest in the Central Bank of The Bahamas established by section 3 of that Act.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The Exchange Control Regulations Act, Chapter 360, has now been read in full and it draws no resident and non-resident line at all. It is five sections long: it defines only the Minister, empowers him to make Finance Regulations by Order on any matter connected with exchange control, vests the office of Controller of Exchange in the Central Bank of The Bahamas, and sets the penalty. Every rule about who may hold foreign currency and what may be sent out is in those Finance Regulations, which are a separate instrument we have not read. Anyone opening an account should establish which side of that line they are placed on, and this record cannot tell them where the line is.
This record rests on sections 5, 6 and 7 of the Financial Transactions Reporting Act, 2018 and on Sections IV and VIII of the Common Reporting Standard as enacted in the Schedule to the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information Act, 2016. We did not read the Financial Transactions Reporting Regulations, 2018, which may prescribe documents the Act does not.
Nothing here is a statement about what any named bank requires. No bank's own terms were read.
- consolidatesFinancial Transactions Reporting Act, 2018 (No. 5 of 2018)
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission)
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesAutomatic Exchange of Financial Account Information Act, 2016 (No. 37 of 2016)
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission)
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesTable of Principal Legislation by Title, Title XLIV Finance
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesExchange Control Regulations Act, Chapter 360 of the Statute Law of The Bahamas
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2001
Known to be out of date. Every page of this Chapter is marked Original Service 2001, so it stands at the publisher's 2001 state rather than at the 2016 cut-off most of the statute book carries. Its latest amending Act shown in the margin is 5 of 1987.
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source