After a lengthy (and illegal) delay, the latest Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen To Expatriate, as Required By Section 6039G will be printed in the Federal Register for Thursday, 14 February 2013.
It contains forty five names. This brings 2012’s total number of “published expatriates” to 932, or little more than half of the number seen in 2011.
Journalists who may write about this list in the next few days should be warned against misinterpreting it as a complete list of people who turned in their U.S. passports last year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation tells us that 4,385 Americans renounced citizenship in 2012, and another 167 in January 2013 alone — and that number does not even include people relinquishing citizenship or abandoning long-held green cards, both acts which should result in one’s name appearing in the Federal Register. I am aware of more than a dozen public figures who have given up U.S. citizenship in the past year, almost all for the purpose of running in non-U.S. elections, but only four of their names have been published. South Korea recorded 2,158 of their citizens giving up U.S. passports or green cards in 2011, and numerous anecdotal reports from Washington and from Seoul suggest that this “reverse migration” accelerated rather than slowed in 2012.
Eric, thanks for tracking the list down. 45 names can’t possibly be the right number. There must have been about that many at the Toronto consulate alone, if both relinquishments and renunciations are counted. What’s going on? We can only speculate, but don’t forget that the text above the list says
“This listing contains the name of each individual losing United
States citizenship (within the meaning of section 877(a) or 877A) with respect to whom the Secretary received information during the quarter ending December 31, 2012. For purposes of this listing, long-term residents, as defined in section 877(e)(2), are treated as if they were citizens of the United States who lost citizenship. ”
The key phrase is “with respect to whom the Secretary received information”. Is someone withholding information from the Secretary of the Treasury? Is State slow in reporting to Treasury?
Thanks again Eric for putting Isaac Brock on the map while all the journalists in the world drink the Geithner koolaid. This is why the blogosphere exists, to make the journalists in the world appear to be what they are: incompetent ninnies.
@AnonAnon: Increasingly I’m starting to think the bottleneck is at State. There seem to have been previous cases where State withheld information from both the FBI and the IRS. Something strange happened around 2004 that might be an example of this — on the FBI side, the NICS database hadn’t seen any additions to its list of renunciants since it was created, but after 2004 it suddenly started getting updates, and on the IRS side, the person responsible for their list (at that time Tracy Harmon) didn’t submit any updates for more than a year after Q2 2003, but then suddenly in October 2004 the lists for the past five quarters all showed up on one day (Q3 and Q4 2003; Q1, Q2, and Q3 2004). I suspect there was some kind of inter-agency turf war around that time and State stopped forwarding CLNs to other departments for a while.
But as for this list of 45 “published expatriates”, I have no idea what it means or why it’s so small.
Scott Schmith, who’s renunciation has been widely published in the press, is listed. He renounced October 9th. I renounced one week later, was not mentioned in the press and am not listed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444592704578062570295543436.html
Or is the key phrase “(within the meaning of section 877(a) or 877A)”? Is it possible that the list now contains only the names of people whom the IRS deems to have expatriated to avoid tax? (I think someone else suggested that possibility — that it lists only “covered expatriates” — in a comment here at Brock a while ago, but I don’t remember who it was.) That might explain the delay in publication of the list, because it would take the IRS some time to determine which people on the list sent from State were up-to-date with their taxes or had expatriated so long ago that their current rules don’t apply.
AnonAnon, we’ve gone through this before. Remember that my name is on the list (last time) and I am NOT a covered expatriate, but simply a person who became a Canadian and relinquished my US citizenship. I have been compliant also with regard to my tax filings.
True, Petros, but I’m wondering whether Treasury has just changed its interpretation of the requirements for the list. That’s why I speculated that it might “now” contain only covered expatriates. That would be a way for Treasury to avoid the embarrassment of having to provide the much longer list of all expatriates. Who knows?
@AnonAnon, I doubt that seriously. What this defective list shows is that the government doesn’t want to answer the question as to why their policies are creating a flood of expatriations. It is embarassing both to the government and to the people of the United States. Therefore, it is not a story that attracts any journalistic attention because the lamestream media accepts Geithner’s numbers. The Obama adminstration has made life hell for expats and they don’t want the rest of the world to know. The more lies, the more the narrative becomes clear: this is a coverup.
To re-post this Swissinfo.ch story from Oct 2012, for the period Jan to Sep 2012, 411 Americans renounced or relinquished their citizenship at the US Embassy in Bern. Figures for Oct to Dec 2012 period are not yet available:
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/More_Americans_give_up_passports_over_tax.html?cid=33824180
It appears that the Enron accountants have re-entered the work force and are employed at the IRS!
@Petros…
I never assume conspiracy when plain ole government incompetence will suffice! It gives me comfort that if they can not get this simple list right, and Eric from Hong Kong using publicly available data can do better, of what value will they make of the zillions of data points they get from FATCA? After all that effort, they will come to ‘discover’ that there are only 45 US foreign accounts left open around the world!
Worldwide US renunciations reported as 932 for 2012? When I directly and personally know of 4?
Dear US:
Effective lies have to pass a plausibility test. I can only conclude that you have adopted the big lie tactic from you-know-who. Are your jackboots properly shined today, or still mucky from the last batch of ostriches that you kicked around? For a US person abroad, the only freedom is fleedom.
Yours with scorn, usx
This is the last quarter. Obviously they needed the lowest number possible to keep the yearly number down, so as not to show a Rising trend.
Only 45 names on the list? — A BRIGHT AND SHINING LIE!
This reeks of the phony body counts announced by the US military at daily press briefings during the Vietnam war, commonly known as the five o’clock follies.
Slate: Treasury’s ‘Body Count’ Dodge
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_reckoning/2012/05/15/treasury_s_body_count_dodge.html
“Back in the dog days of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military decided it needed a metric to prove the worth of the casualties piling up in pursuit of our nebulous goals there. That number was dubbed ‘the body count’ by American correspondents at the daily briefing in Saigon – the so-called ‘Five O’Clock Follies.'”
“We now know these body counts proved about as unreliable as a guide to 1960s wartime reality as the intelligence that would later ‘prove’ Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons did in 2002-2003.”
@Just Me, when it comes to do intelligence work, the rule is that there is no such thing as a coincidence. Government stats are not coincidences but manipulation. They are thus across the board. That is why a guy name John Williams started Shadowstats, to show how the US government lies, especially about inflation. If you look at the mechanism, it is simply a case of adjusting the data until the numbers suit your agenda. The expatriate list is manipulation. They know that the higher the number the more the media will pay attention. Thus, to deflect attention they must keep the numbers down. Now they’ve told a whopper of lie that we know is a complete fabrication. But it is not hard to understand why. What is hard ot understand is how they think that they can get away with it, but remember, they are fond of saying, “We are the federal government, and we can do what we want, when we want, and there is nothing that you can do about it.” They believe themselves to be better than the rest of us, smarter, the cream of the crop, studied at better schools (so 30-year IRS vet)–no lie, no manipulation is outside of their boundaries and they will do it, thinking that they are so brilliant that the laws of economics, hell even the law of gravity, doesn’t apply to them.
@Petros..
Hard to argue with you about past practices related to Stats, but I personally, still don’t rule out incompetence and bad processes as an explanation for things I don’t have hard evidence of ‘conspiracy style’ manipulation. That said, I always take what comes from Government with a grain of salt and much skepticism for the spin they put on things. They do have their agendas. Unfortunately as you point out, Journalist very seldom seem to do anything more than just repeat what the Press Release says. ‘Ninnie’ was your term, wasn’t it… That gave me a chuckle.
The USA government has a black aura outlined with blood-red ink but it uses cooked up stats to try to trick people into believing it is exactly what it is not — all white with sun-yellow tinges. This is NOT incompetence, it is deliberate.
@Em
My only point is, I don’t actually know that!
I can surmise it is based upon past performance, but past performance can include incompetence too. I think we forget how badly incompetent government can be without any mal intent. It is the nature of the beast.
I can assume what you say to be true because I want to believe it is. I can use some evidence based analysis to speculate that it is true, there is all kinds of ways I can get to your declaration, and on balance, I might be inclined to think that you are right.
However, until someone in charge of producing these numbers says on the record that he or she was told to minimize or not report something, I don’t know what is factual and what is speculation.
That is what we are supposed to have journalist for, to get to the “factual” truth behind the numbers or the press release, but as Petros said, a lot of them are Ninnies or not interested enough to find out. Or more worrying, not very many of the public care to know truth from fiction anyway, so there is no market, as they say for the effort.
So it goes..
45 is astonishing, and there’s no way it’s close to accurate. I agree that the Toronto consulate must have processed more than that in Q4 that all by itself.
It follows their previous pattern, though, of including obviously wealthy people: Eléonore Bonaert de Laubespin is a French aristocrat and Olivier Desclée de Maredsous is a Belgian aristocrat. de Maredsous’s family endowed an abbey, and one of de Laubespin’s ancestors was a baron of the Napoleonic Empire. Adriaan van Ravenstein apparently used to run a bank in Curaçao, and is a regular at the Curaçao Golf and Squash Club. There is a Robert Haudenschild who used to be a director at UBS. A Peter Goulandris is involved with a Greek shipping fortune.
IIRC a previous list had the claimant crown princess of Greece.
It tends to back up AnonAnon’s theory, above.
Brenninkmeijer may be heir to a German-Dutch textile fortune. Tucker Highfield is managing director at Credit Suisse.
I have just nsent almost identical messages via their their websites to my two Florida Senators Rubio (R), and Nelson (D), plus my congresswoman Illiana Ros-Leighten (R), and also to Sen. Rand Paul (R,KY) a legislator dedicated to the revocation of FATCA, the text of which is as follows:
“As I am sure you are aware, as a direct consequence of FATCA thousands of law-abiding US citizens living abroad, many of which are responsible for selling the US exports that create jobs here at home, are having their foreign bank accounts closed down because FATCA obligates all foreign banks to violate the bank privacy laws of every country on in the face of the earth by reporting full details to the IRS of all their accounts held by “US persons.” This includes US citizens, permanent resident green card holders and dual citizens of the countries where they live. This is obligating many US citizens with foreign families and spouses to either leave their families behind or return to the US to join the ranks of the unemployed and sign up for welfare and food stamps, or to renounce their US citizenship to be able to survive abroad.
Federal Law requires that the Treasury Department publish every quarter a report in the Federal Register listing the names of all US citizens who have renounced citizenship during the prior quarter. The just-released report for the last quarter of 2012 lists only 45 names. According to the FBI, as reported on this Stephen Brock blog: http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2013/02/13/fbi-says-three-thousand-renounced-us-citizenship-last-quarter-but-irs-claims-it-was-just-45/, the actual number of renunciations was 4,385 in 2012 rather than 923, as stated in the four Treasury Department quarterly reports for that year
I am US citizen who was forced by the extraterritorial tax laws of the US, after 11 years living and working abroad selling the US exports that create American jobs, to close down a business in Brazil and return home to the US in order to survive. I respectfully ask that you hold the Treasury Department’s “feet to the fire” as to why it is massively failing to publish all of the names which, according to law, it is required to publish in these reports. It is my opinion that this underreporting is a conspiracy to conceal from Congress and the American people the true number of US citizens living abroad who are being forced to renounce their citizenship and turn in their US passports in order to survive. The information which foreign banks are required by the 543 pages contained in the IRS FATCA regulation to report to the IRS on all their accounts of US citizens is the same kind of information that the IRS can only obtain from a US bank with a court order based on credible evidence of tax fraud. Yet FATCA obligates foreign banks to report this information to the IRS on all their US person accounts including dual citizens of the countries where they live and work, in violation of the bank privacy laws of those countries. The presumption of FATCA is that all US citizens resident abroad are tax-evading traitors. This is a gross miscarriage of justice for US citizens living and working abroad. It is in total violation of the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights, which through the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948 is included in the UN Charter.
No other nation on the face of the earth, not even Communist Cuba, forces its citizens to renounce or strips them of their citizenship if they live and work in another country.”
@A broken man of a Halifax pier — Good work in tracking down those names from the list.
I have looked up the text of Section 6039G of the HIPPA act of 1996:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6039G
A close reading of it suggests to me (though not a lawyer) that the Treasury Secretary’s requirement to publish the list CAN be interpreted very narrowly to require only the names of covered expatriates.
Whatever the reason for the shortness of the latest Federal Register list, the US government does seem to be determined to hide the real numbers of its citizens who are relinquishing and renouncing their citizenship.
Reminds me of Dr. Smith from Lost in Space insulting the robot:
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/You-Ninny.mp3
@AnonAnon & Broken Man: Yes the lists include wealthy people, but they also include ordinary folks at random, while excluding others who are known to be covered. My decidedly non-covered high school friend was three lines above a Chinese tech multimillionaire (whose renunciation has never been reported in the media, incidentally; only reason I noticed it was because I was looking for my friend’s name). Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia shared a page with random 20-year-old accidentals who wanted to join the Korean Air Force.
Same principle seems to apply this quarter. Along with the famous names you mention is a Hong Kong lady who, according to Google (full name match, including both middle initials) sold her house in Southern California a couple of years ago for $425k … not quite the level of assets which would spur someone to “flee the country to avoid the estate tax” as the mainstream media likes to put it.
In contrast the one HK guy I can think of who is definitely a covered expatriate and renounced early last year doesn’t show up at all: Nicholas Yang, a private equity guy & university president. (He’s can’t qualify for the § 877A(g)(1)(B) “dual citizen” exception because he was born in Taiwan — which the IRS doesn’t consider the “same country” as Hong Kong for tax purposes).
Thank you for your latest powerful correspondence to your government representatives on our behalf, Roger.
I suspect Rand Paul and others would find the possibility/probability of “cooking the books” on the number of renunciants/relinquishers very interesting. The recent FBI report on renunciants and the unusual delay in publishing the numbers is suspicious.
I also suspect mass renunciations/relinquishments is more politically sensitive than meets the eye. It makes the administration look bad. It also brings the injustices of citizenship-based taxation, FATCA, FuBAR etc out in the open where they can be scrutinized and challenged. FATCA stakeholders in particular would want to avoid this.
Every time there is a spike in the numbers the media is all over it. They usually get it wrong by presenting renouncing/relinquishing citizenship as measures taken only by rich people, but it brings the issues into the spotlight just the same.
More letters like Roger’s should follow.