The up-to-date database resides in Part 2 (link at the bottom of this page).
Above is a link to data we are compiling on Relinquishments and Renunciations — a work in progress. This corresponds with the Consulate Report Directory (in sticky post below), tracking individual experiences for each Consulate, along with a timeline chart.
Note: We are using numbers instead of blog names for this public posting so there will be no compromise of private information. Your facts will help give a snapshot of relinquishment and renunciation activity and where that occurs.
Please submit information in the comments here (or someone can contact you privately). Thanks for all your help on this.
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED FOR Relinquishment and Renunciation Data (as reported on Isaac Brock), Part 1.
Part 2 is now open for your comments. Thank you.
I would wait six to eight weeks and politely e-mail them again.
Then perhaps they would make a phone call or two to get the ball rolling.
$ 450 and lousy service all the way to the end.
Renouncing / relinquishing solves the problem of citizenship-based taxation for individual ex-pats and puts the issue front and center in the media.
The higher the body count, the more attention the issue gets, which is the key to solving the problem for others in the future — a real paradox indeed.
My wife and I inquired two weeks ago (the three month mark) and got a reply which was a lot terser that Calgary411 received:
Please be advised that we have not received any from the Department of State regarding a Certificate of Loss for you or your wife. These cases may take up to one year to process to completion.
Sincerely,
American Citizen Services Unit
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada
They were still saying up to a year which is why I am hoping that Schubert’s posting of trying to clear up in 2-3 months is a change in policy.
One year is ridiculous. It smells like a purposeful delay for Canadians in general.
I think they are all trying to make this as difficult as possible. I believe I received the same letter Ladybug’s husband received. Mine would have been in April 1974, one year after I became a Canadian citizen.
I contacted Vancouver Consulate to try to get copies. They told me they could not provide information due to the Privacy Act. Yet, Freedom of Information FOI) says I should be able to access records about myself.
I then contacted National Archives and Records Agency. The woman at NARA tried to be very helpful, but NARA’s most recent records from Vancouver Consulate are from 1966. Plus, they only hold about 3% of DOS records from over 25 years ago.
NARA referred me to FOI at DOS. That letter will go out soon. I’m not optimistic, but I will keep trying.
I have no desire to deal with any Consulate!
Yesterday a friend of mine e-mailed me asking about expatriation. She lives in a poor African country where her and her family have naturalized. They own a successful restaurant which serves a lot of foreigners.
They would like to relinquish / renounce US citizenship before FATCA and all the other anti-expat legislation comes into effect. But they have very poor travel on their African passports.
So I suggested to them the following:
1. Read Renunciation Guide as a good primer on expatriation:
http://renunciationguide.com/
2. Get a St Kitts or Dominican passport for each family member:
http://ciu.gov.kn/
http://www.dominica.gov.dm/cms/index.php?q=node/678
3. If in need of legal assistance, consult a good lawyer who is experienced with expatriations:
http://hodgen.com/expatriation-tax-services/
4. Join the Isaac Brock Society to keep up with latest developments:
http://isaacbrocksociety.com/
That was my good deed for the day!
@ Joe What about Israel if she is Jewish; if she has a European grandparent, perhaps there is possibility a passport from one of the European countries.
@ Petros
Thank you. Her and her husband are not Jewish. She has Irish ancestry but I am not sure how far back it goes before her ancestors emigrated to America.
I don’t know about her husband’s side of the family other than his last name is Anglo-Saxon.
In any case, I will ask because I hadn’t thought about the possibility of obtaining citizenship in this way.
@ Joe The caribbean passports are probably better, with the exception perhaps of South Africa; Africans are carefully scrutinized and they need visas for almost every western countries that I know of. Your friends would probably have to present bank statements and proof of income in Africa before even being allowed a tourist visa.
@ Petros
It seems like the St Kitts passport is the best option because it has visa free travel to all EU countries and also to Canada.
For your PDF:
JAPAN / TOKYO (relinquish: 1 adult)
Request: Nov 21, 2011
1st appointment: Dec 20, 2011
2nd appointment: Feb 10, 2012
CLN date: Mar 28, 2012
16 weeks today. Still waiting.
St. Kitts is $400,000. That’s a lot of money, but I guess not so much for a rich person.
I think just waiting it out is cheaper. If someone has time, this has got to be a lot cheaper:
http://www.argentinaresidency.com/services/argentina-citizenship-passports.htm
I have seen links to other services which claim to do the same service for much cheaper. But it sure makes life easier when you can just pay someone to handle all of the paperwork for you.
Eido: Did you relinquish or renounce? If you relinquished, why would it take three appointments? It only takes one, because you go in there and you tell them the way it is, that you committed a expatriating act with the intent to relinquish.
When my wife and I went to Halifax to relinquish we gave the officials all our documentation. They then told us that we would ordinarily have to make another appointment to sign the forms after they had put everything together. However, since they weren’t too busy that day we could go away for an hour and then come back and they would have everything done and we could swear to the declaration. That’s what we did and felt grateful to not have to drive back to Halifax another time.
Petros: so the “relinquish” vocabulary is new to me. All I know is:
1. The CLN reason says “willfully committed and officially reported an expatriating act [swearing allegiance to another country’s constitution/government] with the intention of losing citizenship” (paraphrasing, as I don’t have it in front of me right now; I keep it in a safe place with other important papers like my will etc).
2. I was not charged $450, it was free. And it’s free for all people that do this as part of their Japanese naturalization process as the above is not considered to be “renouncing.”
3. Japan is a country that requires the renunciation/abandonment/relinquishment of all other nationalities as a condition for naturalization. For Americans this must be done within two years after Japanese citizenship is approved.
4. The U.S. process is unique in this aspect (re Japanese naturalization) in that for most countries, you get rid of your previous nationalities just before to proceeding with acquiring Japanese nationality.
5. The first interview is basically an bunch of questions trying to determine if you know what you’re doing, understand the ramifications (explaining all the things you won’t be able to do anymore), making sure you’re not being coerced or forced to do it, and being provided with the forms and paperwork (mostly printed from the state.gov website). The second interview was returning and reviewing the completed paperwork, passport, and swearing in front of a consular officer that the information is true etc.
Petros: one last thing: I did go to the embassy three times because the first time (interview “zero”) was to explain what I was trying to do. To get into the U.S. Embassy at Tokyo for a non-emergency, you need to make an appointment using their online web form / appointment system. (no well published phone number).
So I clicked on/selected the closest thing: “passport services: other”. When I got to the embassy for interview #0, they explained that not just anybody at the embassy can do this procedure, so I’d have to make a special appointment using a non-listed phone number that they provided me to find a date that the officer was available.
The hardest part of losing my U.S. nationality was making these appointments, and the official is apparently a busy man and only has a few days a month that he’s available.
@Eido INOUE,
Thanks very much for contributing your information for the R&R database. I will enter your information as relinquishment. It is a puzzlement the differences among Consulates and our requirements for being able to relinquish or renounce. If you were not charged $450, it seems in line with “relinquishment”. The quandary is how many appointments are required! The dating of your CLN is also different than that of others — or at least what they have been told the date will be.
Case in point johnnb in Halifax and terse reply for inquiry as to how long the wait for the CLN might be. Thanks, johnnb.
Still asking, why is there no one standard of procedure for the process at US Consulates around the world?
calgary411: there are two dates in the stamp on page 49 of my cancelled U.S. passport: the date of expatriation (which is the same date of my acquisition of Japanese nationality) and pre-dates all of my U.S. embassy visits, and the date that the U.S. “processed, recognized, and approved” this report.
And to complicate this, the date that goes on the IRS form 8854 is the date the embassy first received my initial expatriation paperwork (interview #1 for me, although for most people it’s interview #2), which is in the middle of these two dates.
Eido, I gather that you “relinquished” upon become a Japanese citizen. This is not renunciation. It requires only one appointment, as it is only required that you give them your statement. That you had three appointments means that you didn’t know what you were doing when you went into the consulate. I insisted on my right to inform them of my expatriating act, and that that was the reason that I was there. The Consulate officials are often obstructionist and incompetent, so it is important that those who go into the Consulate to relinquish must know what their rights are. Your situation of not getting the right kind of appointment in the first instance is understandable. Even getting information from these people is like pulling your hair out.
See http://isaacbrocksociety.com/2011/12/12/relinquish-dont-renounce-if-you-can/
And, http://righteousinvestor.com/2011/04/07/my-april-7-visit-to-the-us-consulate/
Also, if your “renunciation” was before July 2010, then there was no $450 fee in either case, because the renunciation was fee was put in place at that time.
Eido: also I should say congratulations. You did well to relinquish instead of renouncing. For one thing, the Reed Amendment does not apply to those who relinquish, only those who renounce.
Petros: yes, I understand completely. I myself was really trying hard to get my paperwork done as early as possible, because it means the difference between one extra really complicated 1040 etc for me, so I was gunning to complete everything before the end of 2011.
The reason I had two and a half appointments, I believe, is because:
appointment #0 aka “request”: talked to low level embassy employee (“visa/birth/marriage recorder”. Not trained or authorized to do anything wrt renunciation etc.
appointment #1: slightly higher level person, reading from a script, with a supervisor to his left helping and guiding him
final appointment #2: swearing and talking to and giving the paperwork directly to Edward C. Burleson, foreign service officer for the U.S. Embassy at Tokyo. This was the smoothest and most professional part of the process.
Hi Eido, Welcome and congratulations! And thanks for explaining the procedure to us, I’ll put it in our Consulate Visit Report Directory. You’re our first report from Tokyo. BTW, to pass the time and stay relaxed in the waiting room for my relinquishment appointment in Toronto, I brought along my Japanese textbook and learned a few new kanji.
@ All, yes, it definitely sounds like relinquishment under s. 349(1)(2), citizenship relinquished at time of taking the Japanese citizenship, therefore no oath of renunciation, only swearing is that the documents are true and correct.
The first appointment (interview “zero”) sounds like a cross between the more standard “booking date” and “interview 1”, as Brock lists them. A pain to have to make an extra trip to go in in person.
I can’t see why, logically, they require two interviews for a 349(1)(2) relinquishment … there’s really no need for a visit to warn the person of what they’re giving up because they’ve already given it up. Vancouver is the only other consulate I’m aware of that does that. It seems really weird as some people reported they’ve relinquished 40 years ago and didn’t even know they could possibly even be considered US citizens all those years.
Petros: to clarify, I knew what I was doing, and I tried to get it done all in one appointment, but they got really aggravated and nervous and upset when I tried to force the pre-completed paperwork on them during interview #0 and #1.
I believe it was because the person that handled me was not trained / qualified to do the process. Had I lucked out and managed to get Ed Burlson for appointment #1, I would have been able to do it all in one appointment.
The U.S. Embassy, even the “American Citizens Services” section, is not a customer service organization so the process was very opaque; they were loath to give me any names, direct phone numbers or email addresses, and they had a “don’t call us we’ll call you” and “don’t tell us what to do we’ll ask the questions and give direction thank you very much” and “don’t rush us” mentality. I believe that’s why it took two interviews.
@Geeez,
Thanks for the link to Argentina Residency & Citizenship services. It looks interesting and the Argentinian passport has really great travel. I will pass that on to my friends for sure.
Check out http://www.doyouneedavisa.com when considering citizenship & passports.
http://www.doyouneedvisa.com/passport/Argentina
I also heard Paraguay has a residency program that allows the resident to apply for citizenship after two years.