Ottawa MP Paul Dewar (NDP Foreign Affairs Critic) is hosting a FATCA information session at Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview, Ottawa, Monday, 26 March, 7 pm. Other speakers include the NDP National Revenue Critic, the NDP Finance Critic, an accountant, and a lawyer. Full details on Mr. Dewar’s website. Thanks to Schubert for bringing this to our attention.
If she is a typical American she is of the belief that America is a) god’s gift to the world; b) that the USA is the only nation where you can start a business or have elections, and c) has the right to bomb any other nation into submission. Lewis Lipset spoke of this as American Exceptionalism; I see it as American Neanderthal-ism. Do not waste your breath on her.
Oops… Seymour Martin Lipset
“US citizenship for its perceived advantages”
Like being a member of the “Master Race.”?
@Professor Beale
I agree with your views about contributing to the society in which you live and from which you benefit. I’m not sure who called you a communist. I doubt it would have been anyone here, and if they did it was tongue in cheek. It is not an epithet I have ever seen used here.
If you are still here and reading this, your response may be that all of us dual citizens should just renounce our US citizenship and not take advantage of keeping the benefits of US citizenship if we don’t want to contribute to that community.
I wish it were that simple. I was born here of an American parent, who moved me back to the US when I was a teen. I have lived in Canada since 1977 and have a husband and children here, My husband does not want our joint accounts reported to the IRS. My children are designated US citizens despite never having lived there. I have professional qualifications to work only in Canada. I have looked into “renouncing” several times over the last 20 years. And it has always been presented as a process with potential down side much worse than just not having citizenship. There was the vague threat of not being able to enter the US if someone decided you had renounced for tax purposes. Although I owed no tax, who was to say what someone someday might interpret as “tax avoidance” And the inability to visit my elderly parents (which I can do on a Canadian passport) was not a risk I was prepared to take.
Then there was the having to complete tax forms for a further 10 years. And there is the “compliance for 5 years with the IRS” which may sound perfectly benign to a US taxpayer, but to someone who lives in Canada, under Canadian financial system, with much more complicated forms which are not set up to deal with our system was not welcome. I owe no tax, but the forms are onerous.
In the past there was little downside to just ignoring US citizenship. It was not a matter of retaining the benefit. Now I wish I had gone ahead and risked it, but hindsight is 20-20. I am on the path to renouncing as many of us are. If what my accountant thinks may happen in the future is true, I may yet be unable to visit my mother in the US as she ages. It is now a price I have to be prepared to pay. How sad.
@canuckdoc: Unfortunately, it was someone on this thread who used the term communist to describe Professor Beale.
Professor Beale, As I said above, I don’t think you are a communist and I don’t think most of us here think that. I certainly understand if you are offended at being labeled with that term.
Likewise, I hope you can understand how distressing it is for those of us who have chosen to live our lives and pay taxes outside of the U.S. to be called “tax cheats,” “tax evaders” or “traitors.” As you can see from the few stories above, we are responsible, law-abiding, contributing and tax paying individuals. These stories are representative of millions around the world–some whose only link to U.S. was to have a parent who was born there.
In addition to the intrusion of IRS into our lives, spouses and children are also affected. In some cases, so are employers or charitable organizations if we have financial signing authority where we work or volunteer. This puts marriages, careers and volunteer work at risk, along with education and disability savings plans for our Canadian born children.
I hope you will take many of this comments to heart in understanding the impact this is having on people who have had no ties with US for years, decades or, in some cases, never.
We all feel like we are in the middle of a nightmare. We just want to wake up and find that it’s over.
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@ Professor Beale
You should not have been referred to as a ‘communist’. Certainly, I do not believe that.
I think both Wondering and Blaze have expressed my feelings quite well. Almost 40 years ago, I swore the following oath at my Canadian citizenship ceremony: ” I hereby renounce all allegiance and Fidelity to any Foreign sovereign or state of whom or which I may at this time be a subject or citizen.” Never since that time have I asked anything of the US government. I have never voted in an American election, nor applied for or been granted a US Passport. Nor have I ever paid U.S. taxes. Why would I? I considered myself only a Canadian and part of Canadian society with its privledges and obligations.
I am a widow with very modest income I certainly do not feel that I can afford to hire a cross border lawyer or a cross border tax expert. Nor should I have to do that. My children who have never lived in the U.S. should also not be required to do so.
Please, Professor Beale, read more of this site. Perhaps you will hear the anguish, hear the stress, hear the tears. What is happening here in my opinion is nothing short of absurd and even evil.
@Professor Beale, I, too, hope that you’ve hung in and continued to read, and managed to get past the expressions of frustrations. Wondering, Blaze & Tiger have shared their stories, and mine, really is an echo. I left the US as a child, became Canadian in 1976 and have never earned a dime of income in the US, nor have I ever owned property there. ‘Knowing’ that I was Canadian, I have never asked for, nor received, anything from the US since 1966. I pay my taxes in Canada and am a law abiding person. I am most certainly not a tax evader or tax cheat. I’m not rich – I pretty much live paycheque to paycheque, and I do not have the money to hire tax specialists and/or attorneys. I certainly don’t have the money to pay fines for not doing something that I was unaware that was required, and something that is, quite simply, incomprehensible .How the US could ever consider taking back my citizenship and then penalizing me for it is something I simply cannot understand. Frankly, I just want them to leave me alone so I can get on my with life in Canada.
@ Linda Beale
I hope that you will continue to read our stories on this blog and continue to write; and then perhaps your not “showing sympathy to U.S. citizens who renounce” will turn into empathy for us. I was born in the U.S. and lived there for 25 yrs. before marrying a Canadian and moving to Canada. We have three adult Canadian-born children, one with a developmental disabilty, and she is a dependent adult living at home. For 45 years, I have filed U.S. income taxes. I took out Canadian citizenship in 1996. I always intended to keep my U.S. citizenship, but renounced this 2012 along with one other adult child. Drastic changes in IRS tax policies, penalties for not even being sure what you are supposed to file, the privacy invasion of FBar, and FATCA possibly happening in Canada, the threat of taking away the foreign exemption, calling our own bank accounts in Canada “foreign bank accounts,” and “foreign trusts”–this has led to the drastic measure of renouncing our citizenship. On a personal note, I was not able to renounce citizenship for my adult daughter with the disability, as others on Isaac Brock with adult children, were also denied. Even though, this is the country that has supported and cared for them, through free medical, assured income for the severely handicapped (in Alberta), tax-free savings accounts and registered disability savings plans. As parents of these adult children, we know a lot of this is taxable income, if viewed by the U.S. IRS. The inability to renounce for them also jeoparizes their safety, if by chance, they decided to take a bus into the U.S.,for example. As their legal guardians, it is our right to decide where they reside, with whom, where to travel,where to work (if able), etc. The U.S. undermines the legality of our Canadian guardianship. On the other hand, I am sure the IRS will definitely acknowledge the legality of my Canadian trusteeship for this daughter, so that I can continue to file her U.S. income tax. One final thought: we, who have lived for decades in Canada, have long since, embraced Canada as our home, our community, and the place we live, work, and support. The U.S. is, for most of us, just a birthplace (and for my children, it was not even that) and a place that we occasionally go to visit family that are still there. There is something inherently wrong for the U.S. to lay claim to U.S. citizens (and their children) for taxation, when we reside in a new country, pay taxes in the new country, and have citizenship in the new country. The strongest way to show our displeasure is by renouncing.
Cecilia Well said. Well done.
Joe Rick Mercer used to do a skit called ‘talking to Americans’ It (talking to them) was a waste of time.
Look at what their inability to listen properly has got them. Not a single bank in the world has signed on to FATCA. Our Finance Minister all but said take your citizenship based taxation and shove it.
If they played fair like the rest of the world does (using a residency based system) they could’ve got the whole world behind them. God knows every country wants to catch tax evaders.
But instead they’ve united the entire world against themselves. What’s truly amazing is that they don’t see what is obvious to everyone else.
Just imagine how many US resident tax evaders are getting away with stashing possibly billions of dollars in foreign accounts. The US won’t get their hands on most of it if they don’t change their tactics.
Thanks, Cecilia!!! You explained what we feel very well. I hope Linda Beale is listening. It is an opportunity to give our stories to another US person so intent on bringing all us traitors to justice — one small step at a time in this education of the “homelanders”.
Actually, I don’t think we should bend over backwards to apologize to Ms. Beale. She has made some really insensitive and ugly comments about our situation (see her responses to Tim). I am not inclined to apologize at all, especially for another’s quite mild accusation that she is a communist. Big deal. I guess it was a “rant” because Col. Kurz used the adjective “outright”: “That woman is an outright communist!” Prof. Beale, please point me to your anti-communist essays!
Personally, I think that, if she is not a marxist/communist, then she should stop promoting Obama’s agenda. Obama himself is an extreme progressive, and in my view, a closet marxist. He wasn’t in the closet at all during his undergraduate days at Occidental College. For the Marxists/Communists went underground many years ago and their views are surfacing in mainstream political organizations, the environmental movement, the legacy media, and last but not least, universities. Especially among the intellectual elite, marxism has a very strong foothold–many intellectuals feel that marxism is much more academic and intellectual than the brutes who run the real economy, and that there is no proper intellectual refutation for their marxist views.
As a libertarian (small “L”) who believes in free enterprise and individual rights, I am finding it difficult even to support theological seminaries (I am also theologian), so much marxist thought has seeped into the academic world everywhere you go. I don’t know why my money, which is earned in the free market, should go towards education which will undermine my ability to make the funds that I would be donating to support education.
I note that Ms. Beale appealed to the “collective”. I compared it subtly to the Borg collective because marxism destroys the indivdiual and individual rights in favor of an all powerful state collective. Beale’s complete lack of compassion towards the cases of people who are genuinely suffering from the Obama administration’s policies in countries like Canada is another sign. Marxists don’t usually care how many people they harm in the process of achieving their great objectives. A truly compassionate person may take the stance of primum non nocere (“first, do no harm”). But she has no sympathy for the thousands of people harmed by the hunt for so-called rich tax evaders. She is unmoved by the fact that so many living overseas already pay large tax burdens in their own countries and she thinks that they must pay taxes in the United States to pay for their right of citizenship (this view makes me ill).
Marxists who are underground will of course deny that they are motivated by communist thinking. Just because Beale comes here and protests not being a marxist is no reason to start bending over backwards and apologizing. The term “progressive” can be (not by any means always) a euphemistic label that socialists and marxists use in order to mask the more radical aspects of their agenda. In any case, on a political spectrum of libertarians on one end and marxists on the other, the “progressives” would be rather closer to the marxists than the libertarians–and some progressives among them have radical views that we should guard against (analogous to the Republican party having to shun the John Birchers).
Also, note that she expects us to read her entire blog and bunch of other sources before we are smart enough to comment about her views. I’ve seen that line of argumentation from (marxist) radicals before. That’s pretty much a diversion–to get you to feel a lack of confidence in your own knowledge. I am basically immune to such rants–and those of you who are suffering under these policies have first hand knowledge of the damage caused by them. You also should be confident in your knowledge of how bad FBAR, FATCA, extra-territorial taxation etc. are. Next she’ll be saying that if you don’t read some of her 500-page book recommendations that we have no right to talk about the subject. That’s a rant that means she’s run completely out of any kind of adequate argument for her views.
Obama is more right wing then Harper. Give the closet socialist rant a rest please.
However people may feel about Ms. Beale, I don’t think her comments were rude. Direct, yes.
I think many of us (me at least) are always looking to see how mainstream Americans or people in our countries view us. I think there’re two camps, with Ms. Beale falling into the 2nd camp:
1- Those that are absolutely clueless that think we’re sipping margaritas on the French Riviera. This group tends to automatically think that once you leave US soil, you don’t owe taxes.
Almost every time I call the US or Europe and speak to a 20-30’something attendant, they always make a comment where I live, as if I were sitting on the beach, trekking through the Amazon, or skiing down the mountains. No joke.
2- Those that think we OWE the US something for being American, or having the “priviledge” of being able to live and work in the USA anytime that we want to. This group thinks that we OWE taxes regarless of how much we pay where we live. US Politicians definitely fall into this category. Seems like Ms. Beale does too with the “best of both worlds” remark. What these people will never “get” is that our ONLY world is where we live. We derive ZERO benefits from the US.
@ Joe Sorry, it is not a rant. It’s based upon the testimony of someone who knew him at Occidental and it is consistent with his political agenda. If the mainstream media had vetted him in the first place, these sorts of things would be common knowledge.
With all due respect to those who commented above, trying to frame this as a left vs. right issue is a bit naive and only serves to divide us here at IBS. Most politicians in Washington (and pretty much everywhere else) are opportunists and self-interested – period. If the republicans were in power instead, I doubt very much they would be doing anything different. The govt would still be broke and trying to find creative ways to raise revenue, including taxing Americans abroad. We have to remain united against this assault on US expats.
@ geeeez Beale wrote:
It is insensitive to say one has no sympathy with regard to those who suffer. It is ugly to accuse someone falsely of trying to milk the system. This is what she has said. It is ugly and insensitive, not “rude”. I agree with you that it is not rude.
@ zucchero I agree to unite against the people who bring forth the agenda that harms expats. However, this woman stands in favor of every thing that harms us: extraterritorial taxation, FBAR, FATCA. Are we supposed to ignore that she is a “progressive” who believes in wealth distribution, namely of the redistribution of the wealth US citizens abroad for the benefit of people on welfare, social security and food stamps in the United States. Ideology plays a role in our suffering. How many countries did the ex-USSR annex? Why is there this extra-territorial aspect to the progressive agenda? Why can’t they be satisfied with redistributing the wealth of the rich in their own country?
So please, explain to me how we ignore that it is the regime of the most progressive president in history who caused so much suffering to us all? Or are we just supposed to conveniently ignore that fact? I am also ready to criticize Republicans, right-wingers and any else who persecutes us. Bush signed the 2008 HEROES Act that caused me to renounce my citizenship.
The only politician I have any respect for in the United States is Ron Paul, who wants to abolish the IRS. Show me in his statements where he wants to strip expats of their wealth and I will disown him too.
@ zucchero I should add too that it is not simply a left-wing ideology that result in US extraterritorilism. The right-wing (a.k.a. neo-con) agenda is also extraterritorial–there are US military bases all over the world. There is a convergence of many different ideological systems leading to the level of arrogance and insensitivity that we see from the United States, both left and right.
The most vicious attacks on expatriates comes from Southern conservatives, but it cannot be denied that it is during the Obama administration, with the support of what used to pass for “liberals, that these attacks have been translated into the public policies that have made me into an exile. However I am in good company with Paul Robeson, Joseph Losey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Terry Gilliam.
Petros, I would argue that this extraterritoriality comes from an imperialistic, “American exceptionalism” mindset, not a progressive one. With few exceptions, this concept is ingrained in the whole American psyche. And it is this exceptionalism that colours everything they think about the world. There is nothing progressive about choosing to exact tribute from citizens abroad who don’t use or benefit from the services their taxes would pay for. It simply creates more economic imbalance, which is contrary to a progressive agenda, is it not? Perhaps this woman thinks of herself as a progressive, but I would contend that in this area she is not.
I don’t care whether someone is marxist, communist, nudist, progressive, green party, animal alliance, liberal, whatever. I was looking to this post as an opportunity to inform an educated, intelligent US person on the reality of the situation, and hopefully, swing her onto her side so that she can influence her circle of contacts. I think that education goes a long way to creating understanding which I would hope would lead to compassion.
@All,
I hope Linda Beale will engage in conversation on this. It is my feeling, though, that she may have summarily dismissed us.
This thread was about the info session in Ottawa. It has derailed. Any reports about what was said in Ottawa?