Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 93 Comments

The good news is that renunciations of U.S. citizenship are getting publicity.

The bad news is that the article does not recognize the needless suffering, desperation, and fear of Americans Abroad.

That said, it is better than most articles coming out of the Homeland.

Here is a comment that seems to me to be “right on”:

“The increase in renunciations is one sign that ordinary Americans who have lived and worked abroad for years, as well as green-card holders in the U.S. and overseas, believe they are at growing risk because of the intensifying government pursuit of undeclared foreign assets.”

Oversees banks are preventing Americans from opening accounts. They will be liable if they do not disclose all financial dealings with Americans. Now that the NSA can data mine (infiltrate) your emails, phone records, text messages, online financial records, etc….under the guise of terrorism, they will have accomplished exactly what they have intended all along, a mechanism to hunt down revenue.

Look for the unintended consequences as their Statist hand presses individual freedom and liberty creating a scenario where one is no longer their own property but the States property. There will eventually be civil unrest, unless these confiscation policies can be stopped. Once the State runs out of private cash to pay for their largess, they will confiscate our assets, just like Europe, it’s coming.

 

It’s time to turn the narrative from:

“Tall tales from the Homeland” to

“The needless suffering of Americans abroad”.

Your mission if you choose to accept it, is to educate the Homelanders. So far the comments are much more intelligent than usual. Perhaps some of you can keep the momentum going.

 

 

 

 

93 thoughts on “More from Laura Saunders @WSJ – Overseas Americans: Time to Say ‘Bye’ to Uncle Sam?”

  2. Wish there was an edit button. I just saw you already caught the Globe article. Should have assumed you would!

  5. The Geneva-based “Le Temps” carried a lengthy article yesterday on Americans giving up US citizenship. Here’s a translation:

    These Swiss who return their U.S. passport
    Worldwide, the number of Americans who renounce their citizenship exploded since the beginning of the year. The phenomenon also affects Switzerland

    The disenchantment is confirmed. Since the beginning of 2013, the number of Americans who renounce their citizenship has increased sixfold compared to the previous year. In the second quarter, it increased from 189 to 1131 waivers in American embassies abroad, revealed on August 9, an article by Bloomberg.

    A trend which coincides with the entry into force of more stringent rules on taxation, including the famous FATCA agreement. The text includes an obligation for financial institutions to communicate the bank accounts of customers of U.S. citizenship to the IRS. This form of automatic exchange of information unilateral push more binationals to abandon the famous blue passport. In addition, since November 2012, the IRS Form 8938 requires not only the details of the accounts held abroad, but also life insurance, contingent loans and owned shares in non-US companies. Any breach of this obligation is liable to a fine of $ 50 000 and can be up to 50% of undeclared if it were to be identified.

    What about Switzerland? Regarding the abandonment of American citizenship, a peak was reached three years ago, in the middle UBS case. “The embassy in Bern was at that time a waiting list that beat all records of U.S. missions abroad,” according to Charles Adams, American lawyer active in Geneva.

    The phenomenon has even led some binationals to visit other countries as Switzerland, for example in Eastern Europe, in order to accelerate their applications. Adams tempers me anyway: “All American taxpayer, where he resides, is required to file an annual tax return and, if necessary, to pay the tax due. For expatriates, an equivalent exemption to 80,000 francs remain not taxable, and for nearly 90% of Americans living abroad, there is no fee to the IRS after tax in the country of residence. “And FATCA? “These are standards that apply to financial institutions and not individuals.”
    However, the evidence confirms that the waivers in Switzerland remain numerous. It is mostly bi-or tri-nationals, whose passport was inherited after birth on American soil, the United States practicing legal ground.

    The case of a Geneva lawyer, 30, who wishes to remain anonymous, is suggestive. Came to the United States in the 1980s, her parents returned to Switzerland a few years later. Born during this stay, the young woman thinking today to begin the process to return his passport. Nationality, originally seen as an advantage in the context of carrying out studies in the United States, became gradually a disability. In 2009, the “invasive” nature of the administrative machinery was finally convinced. “It was a difficult decision,” she says, “although I do have the passport is still the place where I was born.” After letting her passport expire, it will initiate the procedure for waiver soon.

    A situation Anne Hornung-Soukup understands. Board member of the Association American Citizens Abroad, the wife of the Geneva lawyer Douglas Hornung, who defends employees Swiss banks covered by the IRS, itself faced many cases of waiver. She deplored the aggressive nature of the American administration, “lists names of Americans who have renounced their citizenship are regularly published in the Federal Register. They are accessible to the general public, to create a sense of shame and discomfort. Of the approximately 200 people who have renounced their U.S. citizenship in the first three months of the year, I personally know seven Swiss.”

    Regarding the cases in Switzerland, the trend still seems to be on the rise. In February 2013, during a luncheon at the American International Club of Geneva, Ambassador in Bern, Donald Beyer, mentioned the figure of 900 people who have renounced their U.S. citizenship in Switzerland for one year in 2012, according to American Citizens Abroad.

    An abyss, saw the gap with the official statistics of the Federal Register cited at the beginning of this article. So what would cause this dramatic increase? “The tax reasons are not the reason, argues Anne Hornung-Soukup. It is rather a combination of administrative costs, logistics and threats of fines grow my countrymen to act. “Indeed, the failure to report is punishable, even if the tax would be zero.

    Accordingly, for binationals “American passport has become toxic. More and more banks refuse their services for a loan, mortgage or life insurance, under the pretext that we are U.S. persons. One of the solutions proposed by our association is to advocate for a tax by place of residence and not nationality, as is the case today. ”

    Apart from the Swiss born in the United States – those that Charles Adams calls “accidental Americans” – there are also “real Americans” who are considering becoming Swiss and, ultimately, to abandon their original nationality. For tax reasons? “Not really, I declare my income and I have no problem that the IRS receives information directly from my bank as FATCA will in the future,” says a thirtyis-American living in Geneva. “Naturalize me, I think. But give up my American citizenship, is yet another step. I have family there. That said, open a savings account for rental deposit or a retirement savings account has become a headache for me. If additional administrative burden, I may change my position. ”

    Candidates for the waiver, the U.S. Embassy in Bern has documentation for information on the consequences of this approach. Reached by phone, she says do not have statistics by place of renunciation and returns the Federal Register published online. Also silent regarding the reasons for Americans to make their passport or become Swiss.

    After – long – filled the necessary documentation, maintenance and compulsory oath takes place in the premises of the embassy. A whole machinery is then set up. The request of the applicant passes the State Department to the Treasury Department in Washington. And it is only with the consent of the IRS that the certificate of waiver is issued. It allows older Americans to return to the United States without difficulty. Without him, the words “born in New York” in a Swiss passport may wince the customs, the law requiring citizens of the United States to visit their countries with their U.S. passport.

    To read in French and go behind the paywall, google on:
    “Ces Suisses qui rendent leur passeport américain”

  6. Good journalism gets on the right side of an issue and maybe this is a work in progress for these two. Speaking with Liam Pleven he grasps the complexity of the issue. The fact that they would choose to use Daniel Kuettel instead of a whale to typify the US expat in Switzerland is very encouraging.

  7. Yes, this is definitely an improvement from previous articles. Rather than focusing on the rich, it is focusing more on the actual issues.

  9. @Just me, I saw that video. Seems to grasp the issues and our fears but the comments afterwards are loaded with vitriol. Very few seem to get it.

    People, including me, are admittedly scared to comment on there, especially as my youtube account is in my own name rather than an alias. America is a religion and we’re infidels.

  10. @Just Me

    Thanks for the video link..I have followed Peter Schiff’s comments for a decade now…

    At 2:40 mark he points out the collateral damage FATCA is going to rain on people..not only the middle class who have to contend with the complexity and costs of filing a return while living offshore, having trouble with bank accounts, getting insurance policies, home mortgages, but also warns that the entrepreneurs and young people who seek opportunities abroad are going to find it difficult…

    I recall PEACE CORP volunteers who would help communities in Costa Rica rebuild/modernize when I lived there as a youth. Who would want to do that now?.. I recall US mining consultants working in Costa Rica to build operations alongside locals and also biologists helping farmers improve their crops…who would do that now? (if you are going to run into the same banking complexities aimed at the expats)
    The US is cutting it’s nose off in spite of its face…No one is going to want to represent the US in foreign lands, and according to a friend of mine, US citizens are already shunned in some corporations due to the requirement that they also report on the foreign corporations financial affairs)

    (This reminds me of “Who is John Galt ?” whereby John Galt was the intellectual capital willing to help educate third world countries…and he vanished…)

  11. @Em and @Benedict Arnold be me ….That fox link came to me via Tim, so hat tip to him.

    I would have thought he would have posted it, but maybe he has somewhere. I have been gone a lot recently hiking and back packing, so not keeping up with all the posts. Peter Schiff was right on point, but whoever posted it thought he was ‘inane’, so even the Fox audience doesn’t get it.

    @Eric
    This post of yours is again another important insight into how little we really know about the renunciation story from the IRS “name and shame’ list. It should be in the hands of good investigative journalist, like Laura Saunders and Liam Pleven at the WSJ. I have forwarded the link to them, and wished you would consider contracting them, so your excellent work gets a wider audience. Thanks for what you do. We all learn a lot, and this story has yet to be fully told. As Liam said to me in an email, there is still a lot more ‘important ground to cover’!

  12. (you are entering the Twilight Zone , bring your sense of humour)

    In a few decades, I guess someone will eventually get a grant to determine why bananas and coffee are no longer available inside the US…and they will point back to FATCA as the source…meanwhile China will dominate the African and South American continents…

  13. @Just Me

    I’m glad you contacted Liam Plevin. Even though you aren’t considering renouncing, he and Laura Saunders are on a steep learning curve about the issues that effect USP’s abroad in general and your contribution would be invaluable on the subject of FATCA, at the very least.

    The fact that Laura has been critical of the rich in the past may actually benefit us if she can make that important distinction between rich tax evaders that live in the US and those of us who live abroad, and how Americans are suffering because of these bona fide tax evaders. When is an American who has undeclared bank accounts in a foreign country not an offshore tax evader? When that person actually lives in that foreign country!

  14. I put up 2 comments on the Schiff youtube, and they are not showing up anymore. They were pretty biting sarcastic, but definitely not over the youtube line.

  17. This is going to bring a lot of median attention to the federal register and the fact that they’re almost always late in disclosing the figures.

  20. FATCA, the US law that makes those defined as ‘US taxable persons’ abroad report their English bus pass card – because that is the type of criminal master minds we are;

    See; http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2013/08/tax
    “…..as part of the regulations, she is required to declare the balance on her Oyster card, the electronic ticket that allows Londoners rapid access to our buses and tubes. What on earth can be the purpose of this ludicrous regulation? Does the IRS imagine that expat Americans are loading up their Oyster cards with thousands of dollars of credits as a form of money laundering? Is a modern version of Charles Ponzi (who you will recall claimed to invest in international postal coupons) smuggling in Oyster cards to the US as part of a massive investment fraud? Surely not; this is mindless bureaucracy, pure and simple.”..

  21. The UK FATCA regulations that Duke of Devon posted elsewhere here at IBS recently show that even the balance on a credit card from returning a purchase and getting money refunded is reportable under FATCA – and counts towards the reporting threshold.

    The rules of course do not ever describe what happens when the joint account holder is NOT a US person and has NO US reporting obligation. I dare the IRS and Treasury to address that scenario, for FATCA and for FBARs. But they never will.

  22. Does Homeland Security and the IRS and Treasury come across many situations in which US persons abroad have been funding terrorism via their credit card refunds from returning items – for example, too small knickers from Marks and Spencer? That unflattering outfit bought on impulse after the latest royal wedding?

    Apparently the UK FATCA IGA terms state that the credit balance on a credit card from returning a purchase and getting a refund counts as a reportable balance – and towards the aggregate reporting threshold for FATCA.

    Worth a read, as Duke of Devon advises. He provides the link here:
    http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/fatca/comment-page-38/#comment-491328

  23. @Badger, Its intention is to ensnare more people on technicalities… penalties rather than tax as a revenue generator.

  25. monalisa1776 –  America is a religion and we’re infidels.

    That could serve as a tag line for Brock!

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