Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 8 Comments

NEW DELHI: The finance ministry is planning to rush through a Cabinet note seeking permission to sign an accord with the US on exchanging investment information before a December 31 deadline, ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit to Delhi at the end of January.

The government has got the goahead of the justice MB Shah-led special investigation team (SIT) on black money, which allows India to sign international treaties that include confidentiality clauses, an issue that had prevented ..

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/45597588.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

This article is open for comments and they are beginning.

By signing a FATCA IGA India is agreeing to assist the U.S. in imposing U.S. law on India.

The imposition of U.S. law on India includes:

1. The imposition of U.S. law on anybody that the U.S. now or in the future decides to deem a “U.S. person” who will primarily be citizens and residents of India. The U.S. and only the U.S. determines who is a “U.S. person”.

2. Requirements imposed on Indian financial institutions to “round up” those who the U.S. deems to be “U.S. persons” – i.e. those citizens of India with some kind of U.S. connection (probably resulting from their place of birth).

3. Imposing “U.S. law” – past (penalties), present (a requirement to live the “American Way”) and future (creating an “underclass of persons unable to plan for retirement) – on those “citizens of India” that India offers to the U.S..

4. The “U.S. law” imposed on these unfortunate people is a code of requirements and prohibitions that the “citizens” of no other nation are subject to. (The “rights” of “U.S. persons” are only what the U.S. allows. “Sorry, you can’t invest in this – You’re an American”.)

5. These requirements include a requirement to attack the economy of India (yup, double taxation is the forced extraction of “after tax income” from the economy of India to the U.S. Treasury).

6. These requirements include the requirement to report on the private financial information of “citizens of India” who have the misfortune to be affiliated with someone who the U.S. decides to “deem” a U.S. person.

A FATCA IGA is nothing less and nothing more than entering OVDP for countries.

Because a FATCA IGA is an:

Offshore – Yes, all non-U.S. countries are offshore
Voluntary – Yes, these countries are voluntarily surrendering their sovereignty to the USA
Disclosure – Yes, they are going to allow the U.S. to designate who they are looking for, find them and then disclose them to the USA.
Program – Of course it’s a program. This particular program is called the Model 1 IGA.

Someone really should go to India and have a conversation with their Finance Ministry before they decide to “Commit suicide to avoid dying.”

8 thoughts on “Clearly India doesn’t know what a #FATCA IGA is – needs an Indian @ADCSovereignty”

  1. Likely to have a very different impact than in Canada. There is a large Indian diaspora, including between 2 and 3 million living in the US. They form one of the most well-educated, prosperous ethnic groups in the country, and some large number of them retain bank accounts in India to facilitate remittances to their families there. These people are particularly vulnerable if they have failed to report foreign financial assets, as the US can attach their US assets.

    I don’t have a number for US citizens who move to India, but I am sure it is not in the millions.

  2. What a badly misinformed and biased article. Who wrote this anyway? Smells of compliance condor to me.

    I notice the comments can be “voted” on without signing in. If you’re in a pre-Christmas rush and don’t have time to comment then you can at least check off which comments are naughty or nice. There’s one that needs a big red “X” for sure …

    Rajesh wrote: Good idea please do it.

    @ USCitizenAbroad
    If you post your excellent comment there I’ll definitely give it a big green check mark.

  3. I’ve submitted a comment but it isn’t showing yet. Did vote.

    In the usual fashion of media, the issue of “black money” is mentioned, rather than the much more likely issue that this will affect uninformed NRI’s living in the US. You would think with all the plans to integrate data-sharing between all the 3’s (IRS, CIA, FBI ad nauseaum) they would realize this info should be passed on to USCIS and included in every resident visa package etc. Since homelanders are the most likely culprits, why don’t we see more than the tiny mention of FBAR on the bottom of sch B?

    Indian families who depend upon the support they receive from their transplanted offspring will be left hanging. It would also seem to me that the money coming from the US is very likely to already have been taxed given that most will be sending it from employment income, salaries, wages, etc. Indians sending that money legitimately will feel just like we do – singled out and labelled for having done nothing wrong.

    I wonder how many people who end up on the IRS hitlist might also find their info being passed to Homeland Security etc, just because of their surnames, and national origin. Americans generally have an extremely limited knowledge of the history and the people of South Asia. After 9/11 the first group of NRI’s attacked in the US were Sikhs, presumably because of their turbans. Simply because folks in the US don’t know the difference between an Afghan turban or a Hindu one, etc.

    Will FINCEN decide that money moved to certain areas need be more scrutinized than others? What new discriminatory policies will appear? Will the number of names on the no-fy-list explode?

    I can’t wait, just can’t wait.

  5. Thanks for the link, Duke of Devon.

    Why cannot those in the US, including Senators and Congresspersons, see the difference in persons who have made their lives outside of the US and use their local, CANADIAN or OTHER-COUNTRY banks for the same purpose as persons inside the US — to deposit our Canadian/other country income to pay our bills to shelter, feed and clothe our families and to save for our all Canadian/other country earned retirements in the countries where we have chosen to live, work, raise our families, be part of those countries’ social fabric?

    From the usatoday article, can they not see we are not the same of these resident Americans who the Bank of Leumi dealt in offshore evasion? Generally speaking, we (at least for the most part) are not them.

    The Department of Justice said the Bank Leumi helped hide American customers’ accounts at the bank’s locations in Israel, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the U.S. The improper activities included:

    – Secretly sending private bankers from Israel and elsewhere into the U.S. and meeting with U.S. clients in hotels, parks and coffee shops to discuss efforts to hide income and assets.

    – Aiding American clients in creating nominee corporate entities in Belize and other jurisdictions to hide undeclared accounts and disguise the true ownership.

    – Providing “hold mail services” so that correspondence and other account information would not go directly to the U.S. owners and link them to the funds.

    – Opening and maintaining undeclared accounts for American clients who moved their funds out of Swiss banks following the U.S. probes of those institutions.

  6. The Economic Times of India had a news story with a very different on FATCA take last week.
    http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-15/news/57072209_1_fatca-tax-matters-dilip-lakhani

    India has a very serious corruption problem and I think that there is a lot of wishful thinking in much of the reporting. They are only thinking about getting the names of the holders of undeclared money out of the United States. I liked realindian’s comment.

    There are some Indians who haved returned from the U.S. (see the head of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, for example). Some Indians left at a time when India did not allow much entrepreneurship but returned to play a key role in the development of the Indian computer industry. Let’s hope they did their paperwork properly!

  7. India FATCA IGA delayed one month.

    Is is time to Brock ‘n’ Roll ?

    Canada, UK, and Australia are beyond this point with FATCA IGAs already approved.

    India has a history of being a bit more independent of the US than the above countries. Could India place conditions on approval? Or, could India speak publicly in a negative way about it when Obama visits at the end of January?

    If you listen to the Indian Revenue Secretary, India will have little choice but to accept. The bottom 1/3 of an article in The Economic Times is him talking about meeting revenue targets, of which it is spun FATCA is a part of.

    The Brock ‘n’ Roll part. I landed a comment here: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-26/news/57420619_1_revenue-secretary-shaktikanta-das-cent-withholding-tax-account-tax-compliance-act

    How about some suggestions be given as to what India could do other than just agreeing:

    The second part of my comment did not land but goes something like this:

    FATCA IGA agreements are international treaties and for these to be legal under US law they must be approved by the US Senate. Thus far none of these agreements have be submitted to the US Senate for approval. FATCA is unconstitutional, so says fatcalegalaction.

    This is what India could insist on: (1) the FATCA IGA treaty would have to be reviewed and approved by the US Senate for it to be considered law in India, (2) India requires that the US pays for implementation costs of financial institutions in India, (3) India will provide the information but only at the same time as the US provides identical information to India, (4) India would not allow any agreement that calls banks within India “Foreign Financial Institutions.”

  8. This would be useful advice for India: http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2014/10/22/97975-more-needed-to-make-the-february-1-2015-payment-for-canadian-fatca-iga-lawsuit-il-nous-reste-97-975-a-ramasser-pour-notre-poursuite-judiciaire/comment-page-30/#comment-5034515
    — ONE OF OUR SUPPORTERS IN THE UNITED STATES, in this fight from the very beginning, explains why these FATCA IGA extorted “agreements” must be defeated:

    “Along with the death of privacy for Americans clearly is the coming death of sovereignty, too. Once the fox is in the chicken coup, no chicken will ever be safe again from its insatiable appetite!

    This is why the IGAs are so dangerous for what they don’t say but imply – the USA and its sense of noblesse oblige writes the rules, the regs, and the interpretations.

    Through the IGA, the IRS can now claim through the courts anything they want with respect particularly dual nationals and all countries will be required to comply! The counter-party didn’t really just agree to issues on taxation, but the very principle of extra-territoriality of the US government to go and do what they please using the threat of financial imperialism if they don’t get their way.

    The issue here is one-sided because NONE of these issues are even a concern to the counter-party to the IGAs since they never tax extra-territorially.

    So they never saw ANY of this coming when they agreed to the IGA. As we saw with Carl Levin’s bullying of the IRS, they are told quite blatantly to simply ignore issues of sovereignty“.

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