Another confounding dispatch from the inimitable Mr. Mopsick, this time offering some armchair quarterbacking of the June 18th IRS announcements.
Some CanCon highlights amongst the head-scratching tally of winners and losers:
With the Streamlined Express, the IRS has recognized that it is ill-equipped to hold everyone’s hand including old ladies in Canadian nursing homes who swear they see armed IRS special agents lurking around the bushes at night ready to arrest and humiliate them because they have disgraced themselves by failing to recognize their obligation as dual citizens to honor America with an annual tax return for all these years.
*****
The Canadians were not loser’s [sic] here.
At worst, they were reminded that the IRS cannot give them what they need and deserve, which is for the United States to back off, enact a residency based tax structure, and some assurance that despite the fact that Ottawa rolled over like the Swiss and other European FATCA Friendly Co-conspirators, something must be done to address the fundamental and very real privacy and Charter issues Allison Christians, Lynne Swanson, and Victoria Ferauge have been talking about. With its shared culture and proximity to Washington, there should be a great incentive now for a follow up with both governments to craft an arrangement which addresses these highly complex issues. A repeal of FATCA is simply not going to happen and Congress is not likely to be up for a debate on RBT vs. CBT, but that does not mean the privacy and Charter issues are going to go away.
Democrat Claire McKaskill said:
That made me think of 30 year IRS Vet.
There are only losers on both sides.
Expats are aggravated about their birth land, causing them to be discriminated against in their country of residence, and the net balance of all this FATCA crap on the US side is going to be negative.
I would say the only winners are the compliance vultures. Hopefully, there won’t be too many victims of them.
I don’t quite see the new announcement as positively.
To me it means that if you’re one of the few who was so sure that the IRS would view him as nonwillful that he would have joined OVDI knowing from the start that he would opt out, OR would have just done a QD or forward compliance, then for those people they don’t have to waste time and money doing returns going 8 years back when those returns will drop off because of the SOL on optout.
For anyone who was not a slam-dunk optout candidate there is still the same uncertainty in streamlined as in opting out, maybe worse because he is now required to certify nonwilfulness.
@Geom55, I see what you mean: several years ago, most coming back into compliance would have probably just filed or amended going forward, with more cautious types amending up to six years via QD. So far, these seem to have fared better and at much less legal costs than benign actors who were turned into fertiliser in OVDP.
But now that these revised Streamlined is now in place, it will make go-forwards and quiet disclosures riskier. It could also make participants feel the need to rely on legal advice to confidently certify non-wilfulness, especially with the the threats of being subsequently moved into the harsher OVDP. If nothing else, many of the tax attorneys and compliance vultures will try to frighten minnow expats into believing they’ll need to fork out substantial legal fees in addition to accounting bills.
I just can’t determine whether it will be better or worse as I’ve discussed in other posts.
Contrary to this new initiative being good, it’s an escalation of the aggression against the American diaspora, as those left outside existing programs (people facing ruinous back-taxes) will be further marginalized and stigmatized as recalcitrant.