McCain additionally calls for strongly increased CRIMINAL prosecutions of non filing non resident dual citizens.
http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/?id=DD609B36-94AB-44B5-AABA-97B2AB08E058
This may make some of you Obama 08 voters feel better.
Tim
McCain additionally calls for strongly increased CRIMINAL prosecutions of non filing non resident dual citizens.
http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/?id=DD609B36-94AB-44B5-AABA-97B2AB08E058
This may make some of you Obama 08 voters feel better.
Tim
If the U.S. doesn’t go to RBT then I can’t see how anyone other than short term expats can keep their citizenship. It just will be impossible to live abroad long term, plan for retirement, save with a foreign spouse, bank locally without violating your spouses or child’s rights and privacy. Unless of course you have the funds to deal with a lawyer every year to help you and even then you won’t be able to save or bank the same as others will be able to do. All this imposition and cost which has zero to do with owing any taxes. I don’t think I’ll ever get over how bizarrely tax is structured for expats by the U.S.
The second you move away for any reason you are assumed to be under suspicion and wealthy seems to be the way they go into structuring this. it’s like the twilight zone watching the way they think about these issues. No one else in the world looks at expats this way but, they really do believe since this is the way they do it that it’s the “right” way.
FATCA is a giant cover up designed to fool home landers into believing that congress is solving the problem while making it worse. FATCA does not address the 99.9% of the fiscal gap attributable to corporate practices. Multi-nationals take from both sides of the ledger. industrial special interest associations successfully lobby for tax concessions reducing tax revenues while also lobbying for subsidies from the government. The congress is responsible for causing the problem, but expats are getting the blame.
The Committee on Ways and Means is making suckers out of the rest of us. This so called ”reform”, doesn’t deal with citizen taxation which is killing exports, making companies leave trillions of dollars outside the country, making expats renounce their U.S. citizenship, the 50% of those with taxable income who never file a tax return continue to be non filers, leaves alone deductions that are exploited by filers, doesn’t touch the criminal element who file a return with almost no ”reported” income and on and on.
The committee is working for the lobbyists on ”k” St., The tax preparers, the tax lawyers, tax accountants, the IRS employees and any rich guy willing to give to a congressman’s Re election campaign and all who are committed to the Marxist idea of a ”progressive income tax” .
Some time in the future when the country is on it’s knees financially, a future congress will look back at the bills not passed and say, ”why didn’t those idiots pass the FairTax and save the country from the internal decay that ruined the last best hope for mankind”. They will go ahead and pass it, will it be too late???
Listen up U.S. Congress and answer these question. If not now, when? if not me, Who? If not FairTax, what? Do I love my country or love getting re elected? You know the correct answers, but will you answer them correctly with your actions?
The report either has a huge error on page 172, or else it rewrites the tax rules for Form 8938. In discussing the reporting requirements for taxpayers resident abroad, the report states:
“One key limitation of those reporting thresholds is that they require the aggregation of
account balances in different accounts only when the accounts are at the same financial
institution. A U.S. taxpayer who opened accounts at multiple banks could easily maintain
account balances below the FATCA reporting thresholds. For example, a U.S. couple living
abroad could maintain three accounts at three banks, each with $350,000 and together exceeding
$1 million, yet legally avoid all FATCA reporting.”
Either:
A) All the tax professionals and all of us amateurs who believe they understand Form 8938 have got it entirely wrong (the aggregate threshold for ALL accounts on 31 Dec. for a couple abroad filing jointly is $400,000), or
B) The rules for the calculating the aggregate balance of all foreign accounts on Form 8938 have changed whilst no one was looking, or
C) The members of the committee don’t know how to read their own tax form instructions.
These are the people who construct, vote on, and pass tax bills; and then feel free to comment on and criticise overall compliance?
OAP,
If this is a quiz, I choose answer (C). How do they get away with saying that?
@atticus,
re your comment; “..The second you move away for any reason you are assumed to be under suspicion and wealthy seems to be the way they go into structuring this..”
They are controlling the discourse – as per that very valuable link you provided that referred to the US and the other ‘Five Eyes’ similar to this one; ..”..teams of highly trained professionals have several main objectives, such as “to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet” and “to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable,..”… http://rt.com/news/five-eyes-online-manipulation-deception-564/
They would prefer that many aspects of this remain obscured. That is clear by the false claims being made in this report – by deliberately continuing to lump all accounts located outside the US, and all US persons living outside the US in the same pot as US residents deliberately obscuring their assets. Why? Because they have the official apparatus, the means, and the power to promote their message above the truth.
Basically FATCA is a method of PRE-criminalizing ALL those born outside the US who have one or more US parents and thereby inherited US status, or living as duals elsewhere, or who were stripped of US status by US decree decades ago, or who left the US long ago and have no economic connection. Manipulating reality – conveniently ignoring dual status, or status as ex-US citizens, or as ‘accidentals’, is what they are after. Parentage is a ludicrous and indefensible basis for lifelong taxation. Birthplace likewise. And as Allison Christians says, the US taxation of those with no residency and no economic connection is counter to international norms. And essentially indefensible – unless ‘because we said so’ is a sufficient basis for lifelong extraterritorial taxation.
@OAP. You are correct. The thresholds apply to THE TOTAL VALUE OF YOUR SPECIFIED FOREIGN ASSETS. The following is from the 8938 instructions which, as you say, they apparently don’t know how to read:
Taxpayers living outside the United States. If your tax home is in a foreign country, you meet one of the presence abroad tests described next, and no exception applies, file Form 8938 with your income tax return if you satisfy the reporting threshold discussed next that applies to you.
Unmarried taxpayers. If you are not married, you satisfy the reporting threshold only if the total value of your specified foreign financial assets is more than $200,000 on the last day of the tax year or more than $300,000 at any time during the tax year.
Married taxpayers filing a joint income tax return. If you are married and you and your spouse file a joint income tax return, you satisfy the reporting threshold only if the total value of your specified foreign financial assets is more than $400,000 on the last day of the tax year or more than $600,000 at any time during the tax year.
@OAP,
I don’t understand your post. The “report” is talking about the FATCA threshold of $1M (per person, above which is considered a High-Value Account), but you’re comparing it to the form 8938 threshold of $400,000 (for a married couple). There is no relation.
Regardless, it doesn’t make sense that FATCA reporting, FBARs and IRS required forms all have different thresholds. For the Canadian IGA, it doesn’t make sense that RESPs, RDSPs, TFSAs, RRSPs, etc are exempt from FATCA reporting when they are still required to be reported in FBARs and other forms. I’m hoping that this is foreshadowing that these accounts will become exempt in the other reporting, but I realize there is little chance of this. I can’t help but wonder though, why are they exempt? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they are.
What you are discussing is likely above my comprehension, WhatAmI.
Form 8938 is the new form re FATCA. Here is the page titled under FATCA Information for Individuals, http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Corporations/FATCA-Information-for-Individuals. Why do we think these Canadian registered accounts are exempt for any other than the banks reporting to CRA? We certainly need CLARIFICATION of this by Finance Minister Flaherty.
( http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2014/02/15/my-plea-for-clarification-on-the-rdsp-and-other-canadian-registered-savings-plans-are-these-now-for-purchse-only-to-canadians-who-are-not-us-defined-us-persons-in-canada/comment-page-1/#comment-1109560 — and I asked this specific question at last week’s Moodys Gartner Renunciation seminar, where Roy Berg confirmed to me that the US tax obligations for the individual are not changed — the exemption is for the banks only (regarding their reporting on accounts to the CRA) — or at least this is what I understood him to say. )
@WhatAmi
Yes, I understand where you’re coming from on the $1 million threshold for high value accounts, all in one FFI. You may be right as to the intent of the statement, but it does not make any reference to the high value account threshold until several paragraphs later. If the balance in each FFI is over $50,000, and the FFI has done its required diligence on US Indicia when the accounts are opened, then they would be reported.
We then enter the realms of ‘electronic’ searches of existing accounts. My understanding of the Model 1 IGA’s is that eventually paper records must be searched also. It all comes down to the diligence of the FFI in searching for US Persons.
It’s a bit confusing when FATCA establishes substantial rules on US indicia; the committee then looks at all the ways the substantial rules may be circumvented; and it then complains that the substantial rules are still not substantial enough. Time for the microchip implant.
@OAP,
Yes, the thresholds are a big unknown. Most of them say “Unless the FFI elects otherwise”, which means that they could decide to investigate more thoroughly and/or report accounts under $50K or $1M regardless.
With regards to “linked accounts”, I assumed on first reading that this means within one FFI. I’m wondering though if this will include links to accounts with other FFIs that you set up for electronic transfer between your own accounts (at different FFIs)? What about cheques that you’ve written or deposited in you own name from/to a different FFI? It would suck if they ever got to that level of detailed “linking” or indicia.
@WhatAmi
There’s also the issue of ‘linked’ accounts within one banking group. According to the IGA, the FFI must also ‘aggregate’ all accounts within that group if the computer systems are able to communicate with each other. In the UK, many building societies are owned by one of the big banks. In fact, some banks own several building societies. Therefore, several small accounts in several building societies and a small account in a big bank that owns those societies all get aggregated into one amount in relation to one threshold.
Nonetheless, the statement talks of “yet legally avoid[ing] all FATCA reporting.”
Legally, the account holder must report the accounts on 8938 if the aggregate is over the threshold (in this case, $400,000). The statement doesn’t make sense to me unless the committee is automatically assuming all account holders will be avoiding reporting, both as individuals and by their banks. Isn’t that appraisal of US Persons abroad from McCain/Levin a real surprise.
Someone should ask McCain whether he feels he should be paying taxes to Panama, where he was born.
“No hope for tax reform this year”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/25/mcconnell-no-hope-tax-reform-year/
And someone should ask him if all Americans should be able to save tax free for a pension, like he can.
Some of you may wish to comment on this FireDogLake post.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2014/02/26/report-swiss-banks-used-cloak-and-dagger-tactics-to-avoid-us-tax-law/
McCain should have rotted in that North Vietnamese POW camp.
A few things were striking:
1) The really big accounts on average were non-U.S. entities with U.S. beneficial owners. The average size of these seemed to be about four million dollars. or over ten times the size of those owned by people. Are these all shell corporations?
2) The activities of certain U.S. residents and some Credit Suisse employees was appalling.
3) There was no clear breakdown of whether the U.S. nationals, U.S. citizens living outside the U.S., who had the accounts lived in Switzerland or elsewhere, which is unfortunate. 6,000 accounts seems like a lot, but it is hard to know who these people are. Living and working in Denmark and having a Swiss bank account has very different implications from living and working in Switzerland and having such an account.
4) In my experience, the criticism of the Swiss banks is overly harsh when it comes to not asking about the dual nationality of non-U.S. residents. Was anybody ever asked this outside of the U.S. before 2009 and, if so, when and where? I have never been asked about my dual national status on a U.K. banking form and there always only seemed to be space for one nationality, partlcularly on the on-line forms. I have tended to put down the one that gives me my employment rights, since I didn’t want someone along the line to think that I was two different people (I have this problem with an account where there was a mistake with my name change). I have declared everything to the IRS and have never owed the IRS any money until this year (when I sold off some foreign mutual funds). The U.S. assumes that the world is paying a much higher level of attention to its policies than is warranted: when I paid the proceeds of my mutual funds into my checking account at the beginning of the year, I explained that I had had to sell them because of FATCA and the clerk had no idea what I was talking about at all..
Far be it for me to tarnish the reputation of John McCain, but he strikes me as an “entitled” Liberal masquerading in Republican colors. And evidently he was a shitty A-4 Skyhawk pilot too.
http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/McCain-Shootdown.htm
As far as I’m concerned, the fact that he supports the wholesale theft of the life-savings of millions of those of us who want nothing more than to have “nothing to do with America” and their entitledness means that he’s a SCUMBAG of a human being.