Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 78 Comments

The latest expat honour roll has been placed on public inspection for printing in tomorrow’s Federal Register, under a brand new title with a wider variety of punctuation: “Individuals, Who Have Chosen To Expatriate; Quarterly List”. Though it claims to have been approved for publication nearly three weeks ago ago, on 18 July, it was not actually published as required by 26 USC 6039G(d), nor even placed on public inspection, until a week after the 30 July deadline, making this the eighth quarter in a row in which the list has been late.

Coincidentally, this month’s NICS report from the FBI was also delayed — they tried uploading it yesterday, slightly later than usual, but due to an issue with the Plone content management system they use for their website, all of the PDF files went missing. Fortunately, they had more success when they retried the upload this morning. The report reveals that they’ve now hit exactly 26,000 records in the “Renounced United States citizenship” category, up by 577 since last month and 2,193 since the end of last year.

NICS includes only renunciants, not relinquishers; if the previous ratio of 4 or 5 relinquishers for every six renunciants still holds true, that suggests that roughly 3,500 to 4,000 people have given up U.S citizenship in one way or another this year. In contrast, the Federal Register list — which is supposed to include renunciants, relinquishers, and even some green card holders — has just 576 names, giving us a total of 1,577 “published expatriates” so far this year — with many confirmed cases of missing names.

Meanwhile, 124 Kyrgyzstanis among a diaspora of half a million and 817 Ghanaians among a diaspora of between 1.5 and 3 million renounced their respective citizenships in all of 2013.

Media reports of individual relinquishments

The three public figures who gave up U.S. citizenship in 2013 and were still missing as of last quarter’s list — Cuban intelligence officer René González, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines’ former U.N. Representative Camillo Gonsalves, and Pakistani politician Fauzia Kasuri — remain missing from this quarter’s list as well. These missing names made up a total of about a quarter of the media reports of famous people — mostly politicians, rather than the nearly-mythological “wealthy people fleeing the estate tax” — who gave up U.S. citizenship that year.

I am aware of three more media reports of people giving up U.S. citizenship up to the end of June: Bitcoin investor Roger Ver, reported by Bloomberg News to have gave up U.S. citizenship in late February after buying Saint Kitts & Nevis naturalisation; one woman who naturalised in the Federated States of Micronesia in December, according to the government press release (the FSM does not allow dual citizenship for adults, though it is not clear what standard of proof they require that a naturalised citizen has given up his or her prior citizenship); an NCO in the Taiwanese army briefly interviewed by the Taipei Times, who renounced sometime before January. None of their names appear in this quarter’s list either.

Mona Helen Kabuki Quartey also gave up U.S. citizenship to take up a position as Ghana’s Deputy Finance Minister, but only on 10 July, more than a week after the end of the second quarter. She probably will not appear in the Federal Register before the fourth quarter list, if ever. The relative paucity of people giving media interviews about giving up U.S. citizenship this year suggests that most of the latest batch of newly-minted ex-citizens — both those whose names appeared in the Federal Register and those absent from it — are mostly not public figures, or are trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

Comparison with other countries

Meanwhile, 124 people renounced citizenship of Kyrgyzstan in all of 2013. The total number of Kyrgyzstani citizens living abroad was reported to be between half a million and six hundred thousand, or about one-tenth the size of the number of extraterritorial U.S. citizens. This means that, adjusted for diaspora population, there are at least three times as many Americans abroad giving up citizenship as Kyrgyzstanis abroad.

However, due to uncertainty about the size of the Ghanaian diaspora, it is not clear whether the American diaspora renunciation rate has surpassed the Ghanaian diaspora renunciation rate yet. In 2013, 817 Ghanaians gave up their citizenship, almost all to naturalise in countries like Germany which place restrictions on dual citizenship. The International Organisation for Migration, citing third-party studies, estimates that there are between 1.5 million and 3 million Ghanaian citizens living abroad.

78 thoughts on “American diaspora’s population-adjusted citizenship renunciation rate worse than Kyrgyzstan’s, but possibly not as bad as Ghana’s (yet)”

  1. Thanks for the fine write-up, Eric.
    Another renunciant who is AWOL from the Federal Register list is Arthur Budovsky. He was the founder of Liberty Reserve, a Bitcoin outfit, who was arrested in Spain in May 2013. The related US Federal indictment stated that he renounced his United States citizenship:
    “By in or about 2011. BUDOVSKY was so committed to evading U.S. law enforcement that he formally renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Costa Rican citizen….”

  2. Other than the obvious reason of not wanting to publicise rejection of the US and FATCA, perhaps it’s just becoming more and more work to process with the rate of renunciations increasing.

    Perhaps the USG should put more manpower on the task!

  3. @Don: State’s well-publicised IT problems with the Consular Consolidated Database could theoretically cause further slowdowns as well:
    https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249958/State_Dept._database_crash_leads_to_passport_visa_delays

    I see at least three different angles: people will have trouble getting new renunciation appointments because so many staff are trying to clear up other backlogs, processing of existing renunciations will probably get put on low priority compared to immigrant visa applicants & adoptions, and State might have trouble forwarding approved CLNs either to the IRS or the FBI.

    On the other hand, the IT problems started late last month, but the FBI still seems to have got their latest batch of CLNs from State just fine. State’s IT problems shouldn’t have affected the IRS at all yet, if IRS is truthful that they finished compiling their list on 18 July — before the database crash — so there has to be some other explanation for why the IRS published so few names this quarter while the FBI kept going full speed ahead. I guess we’ll see with next month’s NICS report whether State’s issues are causing problems downstream.

  11. FBI list of renunciations only is 2,193 since the end of last year.

    IRS list of 1,577 “published expatriates” so far this year, which includes renunciations, relinquishments and green card cancellations.

    Hmm, maybe Lois Lerner’s dog ate some expatriate names as well.

  12. My husband is on the list — relinquishment not renunciation. There were 9 others at his February appointment. One of those backed out to have a rethink but that still is a total of 9 in one day at one consulate (Calgary). No doubt in my mind the U.S. is fudging its numbers to maintain its sense of exceptionalism.

  17. Bloomberg’s article is up; briefly mentions the Federal Register list (but not NICS), then segues into a Switzerland-centric discussion of FATCA bank account closures and compliance costs
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/americans-give-up-passports-as-asset-disclosure-rules-start.html

    On the bright side, at least they do not parrot the blatantly false U.S. governmental claim that the Federal Register list includes green-card holders. In contrast, the WSJ put up a blog post (quoting Andrew Mitchel) asserting that the list includes people “ending long-term U.S. residency”, despite strong evidence of former green card holders not being included and no evidence that USCIS ever started collecting SSNs of former green card holders to help the IRS match up the data for their reporting & enforcement purposes.
    http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2014/08/06/fewer-americans-renounced-their-citizenship-in-the-second-quarter/

  19. @shunrata & pman: congrats 🙂

    RIA Novosti has an article up. Just a summary of the Bloomberg article, but at least they use the word “Expats” in the headline — emphasising that people who renounce citizenship are already living abroad and are not “people who moved out of the U.S. permanently last quarter” as so many other clueless articles have described it in the past
    http://en.ria.ru/business/20140807/191802722/American-Expats-Renouncing-Citizenship-Due-to-Tougher-Tax-Laws–.html

  20. @Polly: Electra Niarchos could be the daughter of Philip Niarchos and Victoria Christina Guinness, and granddaughter of Stavros Niarchos. I was not able to determine how she might have acquired the taint of US citizenship.

  21. And, the Homelanders start their usual quarterly misinterpretations in earnest: “The wealthy are FLEEING MURRICA and we must (?:coddle|punish) them more in order to stop this disturbing trend!”
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-07/record-numbers-americans-recounce-citizenship-under-obama
    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/07/r%20ecord-numbers-rounounce-citizenship-corporations-inversion

    Also, an amusing (possibly machine-translated) turn of phrase in an article from a Latin American website:
    http://lainfo.es/en/2014/08/07/americans-continue-renounced-their-citizenship/

    Compared to 2012, where some 932 Americans rejected their citizenship or residence. The previous record was set in 2011, about 1,781 expatriate volunteers.

  22. A name that hasn’t appeared on the expatriate honor roll is that of the young author of an article in a Swiss fashion magazine. Swisspinoy translated and posted the article for IBS in January 2014:
    http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2014/01/05/how-is-it-really-to-voluntarily-discard-the-us-passport/

    US citizenship seems to have been inherited by the young German noble, Countess Patricia Beissel von Gymnich, whose name appeared on this quarter’s Federal Register list. She was born in Germany and I can’t find any reference to her spending time in the US. Her mother, Countess Jeanette, is the daughter of a US diplomat and has US citizenship, although also born in Germany:
    http://multicoolty.com/american-sense-of-humour/

    Countess Patricia’s renunciation may have had more to do with maintaining a bank account than being disloyal to a country she may not even know. In 2012 she took over the operational management of the family’s event business – organizing medieval events at the family castle:
    http://www.rundschau-online.de/euskirchen/burg-satzvey-graefin-patricia–uebernehmen-sie,15185862,15253038.html

  23. @Innocente
    The honest to God truth is: why should these people keep their US citizenship? WHY? To have their wealth confiscated by America? And they are not allowed to say it is for tax reasons? Because that would make it impossible for them to renounce? How perverse is this system?

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