In the comment stream, some used various pejorative terms to describe my last post: infantile, tin-foil hat etc. Others said that it was perfectly ok for the government to impose the long form census since safeguards are in place to protect the information and StatsCan has a good track record in that regard. Besides the government really needs this information in order to do a good job, and some argued, to realize how bad FATCA is.
I am hoping for a little more actual dialogue on the nature of the privacy invasion. You see, I am unsatisfied in this post 9-11, post Edward Snowden revelations, era, that the government make assurances that private information be kept private for the anonymous usages of StatsCan. My issue is whether the government fails to uphold one the deepest principles of English common law since the Magna Carta–that every person is king of their own castle (i.e., the Castle Doctrine). There are just some lines that government should not step over–and the only allowable reason for stepping over those lines is if the government suspects that a crime has been committed. But never ever may a government force people to divulge information that belongs to their private and personal life: e.g., how many hours you spend playing with your children. It is completely inappropriate for government to ask these kinds of questions.
And if the government will throw you in jail for refusing to answer these kinds of questions, how much more will they be willing to violate your Charter rights by sending your banking information to the IRS? I am not impressed with our young handsome PM’s first act. I called him King, but the fact is that in the English-speaking world, the Younger Trudeau is insisting on the power that kings have been barred from exercising for centuries by the Castle Doctrine. Thus, it is a violation of natural law, and so naturally there are many people who become extremely irate over the violation of their personal jurisdiction–as elder Trudeau said, the government has no business in our bedrooms–but the government doesn’t belong in our kitchens, our living rooms nor in our children’s rooms either.
The government insists that it needs accurate information. But truly, if the government is justified in forcing people to fill out 40-page questionnaires revealing certain details of their private lives, would it not be better to collect the information just by installing cameras into their bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and children’s bedrooms? In this way, direct surveillance would permit for a better picture of Canadian households and provide the necessary and most accurate information for StatsCan. Be assured however that your private information will be only for the eyes of bureaucrats who need the information.
And while typing that my wife asked me to help her with the new printer. She missed the deadline to apply for financial assistance for day care costs from her company and needed to scan some documents. While we were trying to figure it out, she got an email telling that the application will not be accepted as the deadline has passed. Lost $1200. on that. Now time to do the dishes.
JapanT, As I recall, YOU STARTED THE DEBATE WITH ME.
It is morning here in Canada, my to do list is way behind after yesterday’s ‘debating’, so I really didn’t have time to respond to your comments either. But I did, and now when I bring up something you cannot find a way to answer, you use the busy excuse. Good one.
ooops JapanT, sorry I see you did reply to my questions. I think your responses suck, but I have a busy day, so will not reply. Have a great day!
@WhiteKat
I was interrupted several times while trying to reply. I was unable to complete my remark about replying. I can not reply in real time as I am very, very busy. This whole FATCA FBAR is something that I have absolutely no time for, none. Even befor learning of this madness, before my child was born I typically got only four to five hours of sleep a night.
Now I have to study this mess to protect my family from governments which know no bounds in their quests to ever more power and control over their citizens and the people who support their actions.
I am not off to do what I must do to earn a living because I can not reply to you. I will indeed reply, but it will most likely be between classes tomorrow, my next opportunity to do so.
My responses suck. Care to be more specific!
WhiteKat asked JapanT: “do you pay your taxes? Do you give the state information when you do this?”
The answer veers off topic, but in fact it also speaks volumes about forms condors etc.
The average resident of Japan doesn’t have to give the state information when we pay taxes. Income tax on salaries is deducted by the employer, and normal employers do extra calculations in December so that the total of all deductions during the year is the correct amount of tax on salaries. Often the deduction is negative in December, i.e. our overpayment is refunded and we get a bigger payment than our salary would be. So the average resident of Japan, when employed by a normal employer, doesn’t have to file any forms at all.
If a resident has a high income (I think around 20,000,000 yen but I’ve never needed to check the exact amount) then they have to file.
If a resident has two employers and deductions are insufficient then the resident has to file and pay. If a resident has two employers and deductions are excessive then the resident only has to file if they want a refund.
If the employer is abnormal and doesn’t deduct the correct amount, then even an average employee has to file anyway.
If the employer is more abnormal and issues a fraudulent report (like the fraudulent W-2 that I got from a US employer or the fraudulent T-4 that luckily a Canadian employer corrected one month before going bankrupt) then … hmm, I think ordinary employees still don’t have to file, but I did because I had two employers.
Deductions from interest and dividends are also taken by payers so residents usually don’t have to file anything. Actually deductions from interest are hidden — I used to think there was no tax on bank account interest, but just by accident one time I learned that the interest shown in a bankbook is net after taxes are deducted from gross.
When I had heart surgery I had to file in order to get tax deductions for my part of the expenses. Some kinds of charitable donations now are deductible and I have to file to get a deduction.
When I had a lucky profit on an investment I had to file and pay. To the best of my understanding even this would sometimes be taken care of by brokers, but in my case I had to do it.
The burden on employers and other payers to perform the labour of these calculations is relatively low, and the burden on an average employee is usually zero.
WhiteKat told JapanT: “we all give up an element of our privacy and freedoms when we live in an organized, co-operative, governed state. If you don’t like it, go live on an island somewhere”
He does!
Though level of privacy is pretty low here, and going lower. The government is going to issue us all cards that record 12-digit ID numbers and various other information. As if hacks on the pension agency haven’t already been enough, just imagine what the next one will get.
The government is also considering keeping the sales tax rate on food and non-alcoholic beverages at 8% (i.e. stuff that is 0% in civilized countries) while raising the rate on everything else to 10%, but retailers find the calculations cumbersome, so the government is considering making everyone present their ID cards every time we go shopping so that stores can transmit to the government details of what food and beverages we bought so the store can collect 10% from everything and the government will refund 2% next year. So we almost are at the level of the government installing cameras everywhere … which in fact they also do in a lot of places … but we don’t have to do the reporting ourselves.
By the way, residents of the world’s biggest tax haven also live on an island (Manhattan).
I am a “freeta” and currently have four employers but started the year with five, so I must do my own tax returns. Not that I mind doing them. Even in a foreign language, one so vastly different from my native English, it takes less than a day to complete my Japanese tax return.
I did not come here though to escape giving info to the gov.. Japan is not thane place for that, if such a place even exists. I must submit to a huge amount of intrusive, often illegal under Japanese law, demands for data.
I detest direct deposit of my pay, automatic withdrawal of bill payments (so far I have been successful avoiding that though my spouse use it), having every entity photo copy my gaijin card (green card) before providing any service etc..
I accepted all this years ago in the belief that I would be here only temporarily. I never dreamed I would marry a local, buy a home and start a family here. Now I am trapped.
I wrote about Japan: “If a resident has two employers and deductions are insufficient then the resident has to file and pay.”
Japan T has four employers so he has to do it twice.
Just kidding, he only has to do it once, but I should have said “two or more”.
I needed around 3 days to do a tax return, but mine had complications such as a falsified salary report, or absence of a proper salary report, deduction for medical expenses, or lucky profit on investments one year. I wasn’t doing them in a foreign language, but it sure helped that the National Tax Agency supplied a guidebook in a foreign language (i.e. English).
I’m curious why you object to direct deposit of pay? Even in Canada some employers pay by direct deposit.
If you wish to show your displeasure with TEPCO or NHK you can select to require them to send a person to collect cash from you instead of signing up for automatic withdrawals. You can do the same to other utilities too though I don’t know any other utilities as offensive as those two.
“I did not come here though to escape giving info to the gov.”
Well of course. Once upon a time there were people who migrated the opposite direction because of that kind of reason.
I object to direct deposit and automatic withdrawal for the simple reason that to error is human but it takes a computer to really F things up.
The navy began the switch from paying with paycheck and allowing us to immediately cash it on the mess decks to direct deposit during my time in that service. I stayed with the paycheck to cash method while some of my shipmates went with direct deposit. Two shipmates in particular had massive problems.
One only got paid something like $1.50. He went to disbursing and they quickly found the problem and they said it would be corrected on the nest payday. It was a computer problem so they had to wait till the next payday, two weeks later to correct it as the computer did not allow for disbursements except on paydays. This repeated for many months. He had allotments sent home to pay his families bills but the allotments weren’t getting there. The utilities were shut off at his family’s home, threats of repossession of his car, the whole ball of wax when many months delinquent in paying all your bills. And each payday the disbursing clerks said, “we’ll get you squared away next payday.”
Another discovered a reoccurring over payment several months after it began. Upon his discovery, he immediately reported it in hopes of getting it corrected. He was charged with theft.
One of my employers here in Japan, a university, over paid me by a huge amount. I was expecting a large paycheck as I participated in a lengthy special work shop that paid much more than our regular classes. Still, I thought the amount in my account to be far too much and asked if some mistake had been made. I was assured that the amount was correct. I felt compelled to ask yet again a few days later because it was such a large amount of money. Quite angrily, they said it was the correct amount.
So I spent it. I made a larger than usual college loan payment and paid off a larger portion of my credit card. A month later, my boss, ashen faced told me that they DID over pay me. Thinking it no real big issue, that they could just deduct a certain amount each payday until it was paid back. That was not the case.
The overpayment amounted to a full month’s pay and I had ten days to pay it back. When I politely asked for a less severe repayment schedule, they were furious at me, as if it were my mistake and not theirs. They really went through the roof when I reminded them that it was their mistake and that I asked them twice to verify the amount.
I do not remember how I come up with the cash but somehow I did, without knocking over the neighborhood 7-11.
The mistake may not have been born out of direct deposit but I have never had such an experience when being paid in cash or check.
For automatic withdrawals of bills, it is a lot easier to correct billing errors before you have paid them and the company doesn’t have your money yet, than after the company already has your money.
And then again, with all our electronic deposits, withdrawals, remittances etc. being reported to every single government agency that wants it and across the pond to boot, nah…don’t likes it one bit.
I sympathize very much with Japan T’s problems but those kinds of errors are due to malicious policies. Most of them would be the same whether performed manually or with the help of a computer.
“For automatic withdrawals of bills, it is a lot easier to correct billing errors before you have paid them”
Sometimes.
This year I had my first and only problem with Japanese tax authorities. Ome city office computed overly high amounts for my city and prefectural taxes, based on a fictitious amount of salary. They saw the salary report from my employer, they communicated with the National Tax Agency, they heard and rejected my suggestion that I return with my bankbook showing amounts deposited by my employer, and they still demanded with the force of law that I make my first overpayment by the deadline. They refused to let me pay the correct amount. About a month after that, they issued a correction.
So sometimes it isn’t possible to correct billing errors before paying them, even when paying manually.
By the way, ordinary employees such as myself are supposed to have city and prefectural tax automatically deducted from salaries from June to May, i.e. approximately 0.5 to 1.5 year after the calendar year that salary was received. But since my employer is abnormal, I have to pay manually.
Returning to the fact that malicious actions can occur with or without the help of a computer, type this into Google:
Monica Hernandez IRS
Even though the US Department of Justice put her in jail, the same US Department of Justice still fights against her victims. For the kind of record keeping she was supposed to do, I think she would have been able to do the same embezzlement on paper that she did by computer.
@ Norman Diamond
True. However, problems with paper, in my experience, are much much easier to correct than computer generated problems. I could fill 500 pages with my experiences of this. I’ll offer just one experience.
During a similar conversation while I was in college a coworker told my that things are so much better now with computers than when he was in college. When he was a student, he once lost the only copy of his class schedule, one that apparently was needed to register with his teachers for his class. He spent two very stressful weeks going to one office to another and another and back and forth with many others to get back into the classes.
“TWO WEEKS?! TWO WEEKS!?” I screamed and tore at my hair in despair. Truly, no one understands. “I’ve been trying to get credit for my year of study abroad for two and a half YEARS! I would give my left arm to have had it solved in just two weeks.”
Not only did it take forever to get credit for my year abroad, but this little computer problem caused me to have to pay back my college loans while still in college.
Here is what happened. I enrolled in my school’s foreign exchange program. This program was the reason I choose this school. Although many students had come from the Japanese University to ours, no one had gone to Japan from our school. I was the first. The Japanese school year begins in April before the Fall semester finishes in the States. While still enrolled in the school and in the Foreign Exchange Program, I was not registered for classes at my school as I would be leaving for a year before they finished. As far as the computer was concerned, I was not in class and after a certain number of months the process of calling in my school loans for not having completed my studies automatically began. This began while I was studying abroad. My school loan disbursements stopped. My G. I. Bill payments stopped. I was stranded in Japan with out any of the financial support, earned and otherwise, that I was dependent upon AND had to now begin paying back my school loans.
See, no one thought to tell the computer programers to consider differing class start times for students participating in the various study abroad programs the school offered. Therefore, there was absolutely no way for the computer systems to deal with my situation. And thus, no way for the school administration to deal with it either. But no one knew this. They just kept sending emails and memos back and forth wondering why this person in this department or that person in that department didn’t just enter it in to their department’s system.
After a full school year in Japan, I returned to the home campus and submit all the documents, grades etc to my Japanese professor who then could not enter them due to the complete nonexistence of a program, indeed system to do so.
If you going through life doing exactly what everyone else does, if you keep to the well worn track, then yes probably no computer problem will you encounter that can not be easily solved. However, if you encounter any computer problems after you have gone off the beaten path, even when encouraged to do so, a solution to your problem will not be found.
Paper work problems are also so much easy to fix. Whenever there is a mistake in my monthly invoices, my company or school just prints out a new blank copy, we fill it in with the correct information, sign it and write in the date of the original document. Problem solved.
This has been my experience many, many, many times over. And how many of us on this site follow or followed the beaten path?
@ all in Japan
This “My Number” thing is going to be a lot of fun. As each of the many entities that require my name render it differently into katakana, and then back to Romanji, completely ignoring my instruction and then protests, each of my bank accounts has my name rendered differently.
This has become an even bigger issue recently. A recent law (due to FATCA?) requires the name on all documents of non Japanese to be the same as shown on the passport. Stories in the news paper have told of the plight of all French women, who are now official known by the same family name of “Madam” as that title was at the time on French passports. I have a middle name giving me three names, but Japanese law only allows for two names, but the new law requires the name on my documents be the same as that on my passport, but Japanese law requires two names, but….
In the past, no problem. I just explain that I like most Americans have a middle name. “Ah! Middle name desu.” They would reply and move on. Now, I have been having difficulty cashing International Postal Money Orders and buying even at post offices I have been using for years. Further, my name is rendered differently again by each entity. At some I am First Middlelast name. Others have it as Firstmiddle Last. Others Last Middlefirst and every possible combination multiplied by two. Why multiplied by two, because I have an “o” in my name that sounds much closer to the Japanese “a” sound. I write my name phonetically, pronounced as “o”, it has an unfortunate meaning in English. Some allow this to stand. Others do not. I guess they see my name spelled in English and figure that I am just a poor gaijin who hasn’t yet mastered the Japanese phonetic writing system and they kindly correct it for me.
What await when the computer tries to reconcile all my multiple names into one system under the “My Number” system? Experience teaches me that I am about to discover a previously undreamed of lower level of data hell. I currently have one, just one account out of my various accounts into which my city office can deposit my tax refund. My name on that account was rendered into the same end result as the that on my city office and tax records. What will my name be once everything comes under the My Number system? Will I end up paying income tax as a half dozen individuals? Will I be suspected of fraud, I why on earth does one have some alias names? Why, indeed, even one alias? Never mind that it was various braindead, know-better-than-you paper pushers here and there that mutilated my name.
This has alway been an issue, ever in the hard copy, paper era. But, workable. It has already become a lot less workable as we transition to the digital era. Bad, very bad things await.
Then, as you wrote, now hackers have just the one system to concentrate their efforts on to get every bit of data on every single resident in the whole country. And all the easier for them to report us to the U.S.
Hate, hate, hate doing anything of import online or with computers. Much prefer getting paid and paying bills with cash of check. It is a hell of a lot safer. problems that inevitably arise are corrected with human interaction and annotated in the margins of the ledger and there to been seen centuries later. Not so with electronic transactions.
Dam¥&¥! Typos. ” (due to FATCA)” should be “(Due to FATCA?)”
‘“TWO WEEKS?! TWO WEEKS!?” I screamed and tore at my hair in despair. Truly, no one understands. “I’ve been trying to get credit for my year of study abroad for two and a half YEARS! I would give my left arm to have had it solved in just two weeks.”’
Truly no one understands. People post stories about the number of months they need to repair damage caused by identity theft. I’ve spent NINE YEARS so far, and several court cases, trying to get my US withholding (overpayment) in 2005 refunded. IRS data entry clerk Monica Hernandez is in jail but her cohorts aren’t. Unless I find a court that will even let things progress far enough to allow a witness from Ameritrade to testify about the Form 1099 they issued, Hernandez’s cohorts will get to keep what they embezzled.
‘See, no one thought to tell the computer programers to consider differing class start times for students participating in the various study abroad programs the school offered.’
The same problem would arise without a computer. Managers set the rules, underlings understand what the problem is, but underlings aren’t allowed to solve it.
I write my name in katakana myself, and correct anyone who writes ダイヤモンド (which is more common) to ダイアモンド (which I’ve kept for consistency ever since someone transliterated my name for the first time).
If someone sees my katakana name and converts it to Romaji without allowing for the original English, I’d be Daiamondo. However, the only places I’ve needed Romaji are credit cards and driver’s licences, and they’ve allow me to write the Romaji myself.
If you have aliases and prove that they’ve been used, you can register aliases at your city hall. I think that is allowed even if you don’t want the aliases but get stuck with them because of mistakes by others. But as you point out, that doesn’t affect what the national government does, and there are Germans who also get ordinary words (like Madame) copied from their passports into the name fields of some Japanese forms. But again this isn’t because of computerization, it’s because underlings can’t overrule incompetent managers.
I think the correct way to write our names in Japanese would be Lastname FirstnameMiddlename the same as is done for Chinese people who have three names.
Granted that these cases could occur with out the use of computers, but the cases in which I have found no solution for, have always had a computer involved.
I do suspect, that in many cases the computer is an easy scapegoat for laziness and incompetence. It is so easy to just say, “Sorry, it is a computer problem and that is not my area, Next.” And be done with it than try to solve it.
But at least a few did try to solve my problem at school and my advisor even went so far as to explain how it used to be done. “Students have been studying overseas for centuries why is this a problem now?”, I asked. And she said that is what the “Notes” area on forms and ledgers were for. Any circumstance that did not easily fit into any of the other areas of the form went there. No such flexibility with computer programs. It is one size fits all in the digital age.
As far as my name. I have spent hours with very kind, helpful clerks explaining how my name should be written. They call the home office, attach a post it note explaining it and I think all is well. And then my credit card arrives and I now Mr. Middle Firstlast name. But how can I fault them? My name is spelled at least four different was in my high school yearbook!
It seems that I am the village idiot and do not know how to spell my own name and must always be assisted, errrr.
The info on registering an alias is golden! Thanks! I had no idea that such a system would even exist.
Still not liking the idea of any of this though.
@Japan T, @Norman,
I sympathize with the name thing. My name is written differently on just about every document I have. One bank insists it must be written Family First Middle, in katakana. Another the same order in romaji (which is at least matches my passport). My employer’s paystubs are written First Last Middle in romaji (I’ve been trying to get them to correct this for years to no avail). The title to my house is written First Family in katakana — God forbid I should ever get challenged on ownership of it, because nothing else I have matches. Then there are all the utility and phone bills which all have their own various quirks and misspellings.
I actually think the My Number thing might help disambiguate this situation. Until it gets stolen by hackers, of course.
Fantastic! My parents gave me a first name but always called me by my middle name. One year I simply switched them on my passport application and no one objected.
Then I got a NEXUS card in the same order as my passport.
At renewal time , the AMerican nexus border guy official says ‘we have a problem’. Oh? ‘ Your passport doesn’t match your birth certificate.’
Quick explanation and he says OK you’ll get it in the mail.
Naturally they screwed it up and reversed my names to match my birth certificate. Back to Nexus office. This time a long explanation where I was born all boys were called Joseph, god-fathers name, given name and surname. All girls were Marie, god-mothers name, given name, surname. Birth certificates deliberately don’t specify the order. Explain that to an American border guy. ‘ sir ,if you don’t like it, go to a judge and change your name. End of.
Try to imagine how FATCA can deal with millions of reports from hundreds of countries all with different ways of naming people unless each such person also supplies his US SIN. Ain’t gonna happen.
Tr
I forgot to include a great example.
The first Trudeau P.M. was christened Joseph Phillipe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau.
@Duke of Devon
My son’s first name is Joseph, but we always called him by his middle name, lol!
What will probably happen is the US govv will assign you a name and force you to change all other docs to match. Or just skip taht step and assign numbers and disallow names.
Foo wrote: “The title to my house is written First Family in katakana — God forbid I should ever get challenged on ownership of it, because nothing else I have matches.”
Go to your city hall and register First Family as an alias for whatever name appears on your residence certificate (formerly alien registration certificate). They’ll want proof that you’re using your alias, so bring your house title.
As far as I can tell, it should not have been possible to register your house in that name. To buy property you need a name stamp registration certificate, and normally they only issue those in the name that appeared on what was probably your alien registration certificate at the time. If your name stamp had an alias differing from your alien registration certificate, you had to get your name stamp registered as an alias.
My name stamp was made in China so it has genuine Kanji: 鑽石. When I asked my city office for a name stamp registration, they said they couldn’t issue one unless I first register 鑽石 as an alias, which could be done by asking my wife to mail a letter addressed to 鑽石 at my address. We skipped it because whoever was demanding the name stamp registration certificate decided they didn’t need it after all. I think now an alias needs a bit more than just receiving a letter addressed that way, but anyway find out what you need.
Some obscure American that no one ever heard of switched his names from birth order too. His last name was Eisenhower.
Norman, can more than alias be registered? I already have an alias registered on my resident registration to match a financial account.
I don’t remember how the house registration ended up that way. I didn’t used to worry much about correcting inconsistencies, especially as it always seems a losing battle. (“We don’t care what you think your name is, our system can only handle it in this manner, so to us, this is you.”)
@Norman Diamond
Sam Grant is another.
Allowed, not allowed no matter because it happens. And as long as we can communicate with a himan beiend and the rules of human interaction apply, a solution is possible. Not be any means guaranteed but possible.
Replace the rules of human interaction with what the data fields of a computer program allow to be input and what the program does with that data and the possiblity of a solution is as close to zero as possible. At least that has been my experience.