This Robert Wood post about renouncing citizenship (includes #Americansabroad) has had more than 100,000 views http://t.co/Yg22vypfxN
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) August 9, 2014
Robert Wood deserves credit for keeping issues surrounding Americans abroad in the Homeland news. This is a good article . But, more to the point it has generated over 100,000 views and some intelligent comments.
This earlier Wood post on #Americansabroad renouncing because #FATCA is one of most read on Forbes w > 600,000 views http://t.co/qG5YvjfRCp
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) August 9, 2014
Again, an interesting article with lots of comments.
Pingback: Robert Woods posts on renunciations, #FATCA, #Americansabroad « GATCA
With the last quarterly list, I googled some of the uncommon surnames.
The Linkedin pages had the following:
A lady who from Canada that worked for the Canadian Government.
A guy who worked for GM and runs his own company in Ecuador.
A ;lady who’s a professional photographer in Israel.
A guy with a PhD in International Business working for a investment company in Switzerland.
A guy who head a Spectrometry lab for a drug company in Switzerland.
A Professor Emeritus in Victoria BC.
A guy working for a energy trading company in Switzerland with a MBA from Boston College and a PhD from the Univ of Houston.
A ordinary middle class Canadian from Nova Scotia running a retail shop.
A doctor who is a Medical Director in Ottawa.
A Saudi who works for a family large family company who doesn’t want the IRS involved in their business.
A professional trainer from Toronto.
The President of the Levono Group for EAME.
A guy who works in Paris in the capital markets.
This was an unscientific straw poll for last month, but it gives a flavour of the type of people walking away from the US. In many cases highly educated people who have come to the conclusion FATCA is not for them.
A more and more people hear the FATCA siren, they too will head for the door.
Senators Schumer and Levin are trying to handcuff people to the US and it won’t work.
@Don
Interesting idea, never thought of doing that. Wish there were a way to further categorize as to who were born and raised there; who immigrated for family reasons and who came for education and/or employment. I wonder especially, how many of those who did immigrate, have decided it simply wasn’t worth it.
My most recent comment and Robert Wood’s response:
Great comment, Deckard. I’ll bet you’re referring to this good piece (for anyone who hasn’t read it): http://www.caseyresearch.com/freeman/and-the-credit-for-defeating-slavery-in-america-goes-to-criminals.
Wait a minute … if treasury can not be trusted, as Mr Wood claims, why isn’t he — or some Brockers filing a formal complaint to TIGTA?
http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/
Treasury and other Homelanders love to cite that a wave of new iimmigrants flood into the US every year legally and about 1 Million become citizens each year – while only a few thousand give up their US citizenship. What is never studied is the quality of those giving up vs those ‘flooding’ in. Even a cursory review using Linkedin shows that most giving up US citizenship are educated, professional and worldly people. Just the kind of people the US should seek to keep as international citizens. The short sighted stupidty treating citizens as financial slaves is amazing.
@Steve – Yes 1 million new tax slaves (oops I meant US citizens) but where are most of these people coming from? It’s developing countries.
How many are taking US citizenship from the G8? Not many. How many British, French, or Germans take on US citizenship? Not many.
In fact the American/German (sorry now only German) heir to the Faber Castell fortune has just renounced on the current quarterly list. She was only about 24 years old. Obviously she and her aristocratic father are not interested in FATCA or the US tax system.
The US for foreigners will be about getting a Green Card (which is easier to dump), do what they need to do in the US, hand back the Green Card, and pursue their dreams abroad without the hindrance of US citizenship.
In their minds the US will be a marketplace to treat almost in isolation from the rest of the world.
@Don
GC is not easier to dump… after a certain number of yrs… to exit the US… needs to pay an exit tax also just like a citizen… nobody said crap about that when they issue a gc…
Green cards are a great opportunity for the non-working spouses of rich & well advised investors who want to flit in for a few years to send their kids to US universities, and a giant morass for average skilled workers who want to develop their careers but retire back in the old country.
Consider the average skilled worker, who has been working & getting experience & accumulating assets in his home country, and contributing every month or year to some form of local retirement plan that the US deems to be a “foreign trust”. Now he has a sudden opportunity to move to the US to continue developing his career; too short a time frame to do much pre-immigration tax planning, and anyway he’s not rich enough to be well-advised. The whole time he’s in the US he’ll be paying US tax on the gains in his retirement plan, even the unrealised gains if the plan holds things that the IRS deems to be PFICs. His assets he built up in the “old country” count towards the asset threshold for the eventual exit tax. And he will definitely hit the 8 out of 15 threshold: he’s never heard of it anyway, and 8 years (really 6 years) is too short for serious career development.
Now consider the rich family who wants to get an EB-5. Why an EB-5 instead of an E-2 non-immigrant treaty investor visa? Well, EB-5 qualifies your kid as a state resident for university purposes; E-2 usually doesn’t. That means two benefits: easier admissions (e.g. the California top 9% admission guarantee) and in-state tuition (in Michigan, $60k of savings over 4 years; in California nearly $100k; equivalent to an extra guaranteed return of up to 20% on the $500k invested in the EB-5 business, on top of the returns from the business itself). Education of children is the #1 reason that Chinese HNWIs (the #1 users of EB-5s) cite as their motivation for considering migration. To prevent the dividends & cap gains in their non-US investments from being taxed while they hold the GCs, they have to put them in a pre-immigration trust at least 5 years before getting the EB-5s, but that’s easy because they know their timing long in advance. And the 8 out of 15 rule doesn’t matter because it’s certainly long enough to put one kid through college; maybe even two. And then the whole family give up the EB-5s afterwards.
@Steve, “Just the kind of people the US should seek to keep as international citizens.”
Instead of turning us into badwill ambassadors?
Frankly, I no longer have anything good to say about that place.