By popular request, I am making a separate post on the second of a two part effort by Stephen Mopsick to focus attention on tax justice for U.S. Persons. His first related to American Citizens abroad, and was a posted here.
On his blog, which he just posted yesterday, is his call for tax justice for immigrants as related to FBAR penalties. I know that there are many immigrant who read here but do not comment, and would be interested in seeing this commentary. They might not have been following the references to this post in other threads, so pulling it out for attention. In it he writes:
The Plight of Recent Immigrants to the US: On top of all this, we are seeing an increasingly large number of a new class of people who are wondering how to be compliant with their taxes: recent immigrants to the United States who are otherwise squeaky clean tax compliant citizens who are only now learning that that bank account back home on which they have signing authority, may now be putting them at risk for confiscatory FBAR penalties.
Note: I have not received Steven’s permission to post his commentary in its entirety, so will just provide the link here. I highly recommend it contents for your attention.
Christophe… I will continue the off subject trend, just to say this… 🙂
As Tim says, this all relates back to the 2008 financial melt down, and attempts to regulate risk that the “Too Big to Fail” banks take at tax payer expense.
I am more in the school of less complex measures than 1000s of pages of regulations (which can all be gamed) or new taxes which will create other distortions, inevitably.
I like simple things like putting back the separation of Glass Steagall (Commerical banking and investment banking walled off) and breaking up the Big banks into smaller chunks (maximum Market or Capitalization Caps) so they can fail without systemic risk and tax payer bail outs.
In my perfect world, investment banking could not be publicly traded Corporations unless the Management had a high percentage of their personal wealth at risk and tied directly to the failures of their speculative traders. This casino bonus culture on the upside, and tax payer bail out on the downside has to end.
It is hard to set back the clock, but we need to try. I wished Solomon brothers had never gone public. They were the leading edge of a trend that started in the early 80s and ended up consolidated with Citigroup whose CEO, Sandy Weill, was behind the lobbying push which brought down Glass-Steagall under Clinton. Now he has found Jesus, and realizes it was all a mistake, his conversion will be condemned by all his other disciples and “true believers” from that era!
I tend to read Simon Johnson’s The Baseline Scenario a bit, and am persuaded by some of his views. Here is his latest. Big Banks Fall Back On Three Myths
And since we are off subject, 🙂 this conservative Economist makes some good points about Why Good governments go Bad, and how to deal with it. Simplify to restore Trust.
…and now bringing this back on subject to FATCA and FBAR, simplification is just the opposite of what is being done now, to deal with the homeland tax evasion problem. Both in terms of the OVDI and FBAR penalty administration, and the new FATCA legislation.
It is the Complexity, Stupid.
Look at the OVDI complexity where the IRS has lost the plot! Have you recently read all the FAQs?
We know FATCA draft regulations were 388 pages, and now we have 2 versions of IGAs. Any bets as to the total regulatory pages that will be written before this is all said and done? I would not be surprised if it rivals Dodd-Frank, although that would take some work, as the Volcker rule is probably as Big as the FATCA regs alone!
@Just Me, I don’t find such musings off topic because it has to do with the public trust and how crony capitalism is thriving in the United States–and this affects us all because the whole system has become corrupt. Thus, if we can encourage those US persons abroad that have never paid taxes not to start now, there could never be a better time. We mustn’t prolong the survival of this beast.
American dream is well alive for immigrants
Qiao Liang, a Chinese immigrant (now US citizen) has trained two Olympics Gym all around gold medalists Shawn Johnson (2008) and Gabby Douglas (2012).
I wanted to post on Steven Mopsick’s latest blog entry, but he restricted access to it, so I’ll just post it here:
http://mopsicktaxlaw.blogspot.ch/2013/03/on-january-30-and-february-1-i-chaired.html
@swisspinoy, Mopsick says;
…”The overriding sense of the conference concerned how to use FATCA as a business and growth opportunity.”….
……..”The people around the world who stand to profit from FATCA are not thinking much about government intrusions into the private lives of the world citizens. That is the furthest thing from their minds….”
“In the FATCA compliance world, we are seeing the free enterprise/free market system at work. This is all about Adam Smith and the profit motive and how that shapes what we see in the world around us…..”
These comments by Mopsick just add to my sense of motivation to try harder to throw a wrench into their attempts to profit off our legal, local and already taxed, hard earned cash and family savings and trample over us and our Charter of Rights, and our constitution. And by ‘their’, I mean the US, AND the banks.
@Badger, all I can say is how Relieved I’ll be when I get my CLN. I just want out from all this madness…