It is difficult to find a small enough violin to play for Mr. Stack and the United States Treasury. https://t.co/Sm3VUcRJaQ
— Allison Christians (@taxpolblog) May 16, 2016
by Julie Martin
The first tweet I saw this morning was the one above. Really liked the “small-enough-violin” image and curious enough to read it (even though I saw “BEPS” in the first paragraph).
At any rate, I laughed so hard the tears were running down my face. The irony, hypocrisy and completely delusional state of mind of the U.S. and it’s representatives such as Stack, is beyond comprehension.
I think we’ve found it!
(NB: MNE= Multi-National Entity)
The best ones/excerpts:
Countries participating in the OECD/G20 base erosion profit shifting (BEPS) project sought to rewrite international tax rules for the digital economy and for intellectual property to increase their tax take at the expense of the United States, said Robert Stack, Treasury deputy assistant secretary (International Tax Affairs), May 13, at a National Tax Association conference in Washington.
The irony "at the expense of the US" Why, one would think Mr. Stack had never heard of #FATCA <snarl> payback time! https://t.co/YWhuWi8XIJ
— Patricia Moon (@nobledreamer16) May 16, 2016
According to Stack, during the BEPS negotiations countries were “more than happy to go after US multinationals who are US taxpayers because, after all, they don’t vote in those countries so [they are] a sitting target.”
“Wow, sounds an awful lot like why Treasury applies rotten US tax law to expats and gets away with it. No real vote = “sitting target.” How well WE understand that, MythsteR. Stack.”
The US is “one of the few countries that seems to have a vibrant digital economy,” consequently, the BEPS work in that area “had more of a flavor of people seeking to increase their revenue regardless of the principles that might be applied,” the US Treasury official said.
“BWWWWWWAAAAAAAHHAAAAAAAA! Seriously, are you kidding me?”
One of the extraordinary ways the United States did itself harm was to let this deferred income sit offshore and for every other country to think ‘by golly that must be mine,’ the US is not taxing it,’” he said.
“Born in the USA? “What’s yours is mine.” WE get first dibs on your tax-deferred accounts, capital gains from selling your house and we’ll tax/penalize the daylights out of you for buying “foreign” mutual funds. “Um, and your kids, we’ll take your kids too.”
Stack also said he found it personally frustrating that the US tax community does not seem to want tax certainty.
“Doh? Why would the tax compliance industry want tax certainty? As it stands now, the current IRC is so convoluted nobody understands it, all at the taxpayers’ expense. Why mess up a good thing?”
Stack also said that one of the “core drivers” of the BEPS project was the belief that if countries undertook collective action to agree to international tax rules, countries would not go their own way and enact laws inconstant with the international agreements.
“Did you say you had finally signed on to CRS MythsteR. Stack? So that means you’ll be dumping FATCA, right?”
2 percent of all profit shifting by US MNEs goes to seven tax haven locations: Caymans, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Ireland, and Singapore. US MNEs pay an effective tax rate less than 5 percent in each of these jurisdictions,
“USA – USA – USA“-
“The raw fact of the matter MythsteR. Stack, is that You Can’t Handle the Truth. You ARE Col. Jesup. You really BELIEVE the barrage of exceptionalist rationale that you spout off so self-righteously.”
“Oh, and BTW MythsterR. Stack, Cry me a River”…..
Stack is your stereotypical government grunt. He has no brain of his own. He is just a speaker voice
of the equally gruntable Jack Lew. I feel sorry for people who have been guided into this tunnel-visioned life. They both just focus on “its the law” and bellow its every word. Morals and ethics are thrown out the window. Should let them both know that slavery and segregation were the law once as well. thank God we had the fortitude to stand up to those wrongs.
It is well known that Kenya can’t FATCA Obama because Kenya renounced the Kenyan citizenship that Kenya temporarily assigned by inheritance from Obama’s father.
However, did the UK ever renounce the UK citizenship that Trump inherits from Trump’s mother?
Here’s hoping President Trump gets to build his wall, and here’s hoping President Trump gets FATCAed by the UK.
According to Robert Stack’s LinkedIn profile, as of January 2017 he is no longer at the U.S. Treasury Department:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-stack-85142a4
Mark Mazur, Assistant Treasury Secretary, International, and Robert Stack’s supervisor, is leaving or has left the Treasury Department and will be joining the Tax Policy Center as of February 2017:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/mark-mazur-take-over-tpc-director
This is welcome news as Mazur and Stack were two of the key figures in rolling out FATCA IGAs.
BTW: Tax Policy Center is a liberal non-governmental agency with ties to the Brookings Institute and the Urban Institute.
Mythster Stack is now a member of Twitter.
https://twitter.com/rescobarstack
Oh Mythster Staaaaaaack. We are STILL not a myth!
http://we-are-not-a-myth.tumblr.com/
The Hypocrisy issuing forth from the Mythster continues…
“…Levin-Epstein: What were some of the more challenging aspects of the job?
Stack: I think clearly for me among my biggest challenges was working with other countries, particularly the EU member states, at the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] and elsewhere in a highly politicized atmosphere around issues of multinational tax avoidance. The U.S. goal was to keep the focus on working together in a principled way to establish clear, administrable rules to tackle tax avoidance. We were also of the view that defending and upholding the rule of law is the best guarantor over the long term of good tax administration and global economic growth. Unfortunately, some countries pursued narrow self-interest, and the political environment often pushed toward more politicized outcomes that I fear will bring more instability to the system. The EU member states exacerbated these problems through things like state aid investigations and proposing rules that depart from the international consensus reached at the OECD, basically threatening the constructive role that can be played by the OECD. I think this will continue to be an issue for my successor….”
http://taxexecutive.org/qa-with-robert-stack/
Oh yeah, it is the poor put upon US that had to use FATCAextortion, while refusing to actually provide any true reciprocity or sign on to the CRS.
And the OECD is dominated by the US, and isn’t a true ‘international’ body with equal voice and weight given to other smaller countries.
And re FATCA the Mythster opines;
…”Levin-Epstein: Where are we with FATCA right now?
Stack: From the United States’ perspective—and I’m out of government, I don’t have all the numbers—we have well over 100 intergovernmental agreements. The IRS has begun to exchange information, both receive it and send it out; and I think in those respects, from the U.S. perspective, the teams at IRS and Treasury have been extraordinarily successful in getting FATCA implemented. The more important outgrowth of FATCA, of course, was that the world adopted something called the “Common Reporting Standard,” which has effectively globalized FATCA, so that each jurisdiction can learn from the other participating jurisdictions about accounts and financial assets that their residents have in other jurisdictions. The Obama administration made legislative proposals to make the United States fully compliant with the Common Reporting Standard with respect to information we give to other countries about their residents with accounts here, and they have yet to be enacted. Having said that, we still exchange a great deal of information under FATCA with many of our treaty and TIEA partners (that’s the Tax Information Exchange Agreement partners), so that the United States is adding greatly to the exchange of such information around the world so tax administrations can enforce their laws.”….
Talk about disingenous;
“…The Obama administration made legislative proposals to make the United States fully compliant with the Common Reporting Standard with respect to information we give to other countries about their residents with accounts here, and they have yet to be enacted. Having said that, we still exchange a great deal of information under FATCA with many of our treaty and TIEA partners (that’s the Tax Information Exchange Agreement partners), so that the United States is adding greatly to the exchange of such information around the world so tax administrations can enforce their laws.”..”…
@badger
Aside from relief from the threat of economic sanctions and the promise of reciprocity, it’s my understanding that Canada isn’t getting anything it didn’t have without the FATCA IGA.
Laughable.
“The U.S. goal was to keep the focus on working together in a principled way…..” Translation: we tell you what to do and when to do it; you do exactly what we want when we want it done or we’ll destroy your financial institutions.
“the United States is adding greatly to the exchange of such information around the world….”. Translation: We add to the exchange of information the same way a black hole “exchanges” matter.
I could go on but why bother. We know what a bullshitter he is. I wonder if he really believes that crap himself or he just feels compelled to keep on spouting the party line.
@Maz57
You should ask him:
@rescobarstack on twitter
He responded to one of my tweets, denying he said that FATCA harms Americans abroad. I said I’d coined the title “Mythster” for him, lol. A “Mythster” turned up on Brock not so many days ago – you think it might have been him?
@BB
That’s sounds about right-click on link below to see chart comparing what’s received by/given out by the US. It’s interesting to imagine how the U.S. could prepare one of their tax returns without any known balances on an account……..
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/current-information-shared-by-the-u-s/
@Trish
This is a pre-FATCA IGA article, but it states the current situation well:
“…We [Canada] are the exception—the only country with which the U.S. has an automatic information-sharing agreement. Now, the trouble with FATCA is that it demands some new information: Not about the Canadian assets and incomes of people who live in the U.S. but about the assets and incomes of people who live in Canada but might have some ties to the U.S. While Canadian taxation, thankfully, is based on residency—you owe the CRA if you’ve been living in Canada—the U.S. has started demanding that its citizens file taxes regardless of where they live.
In other words, the U.S. wants extra information from Canada, but it isn’t immediately obvious that Canada needs or even wants more information from the U.S. than it already receives. And if not information, are we going to get anything in exchange at all?”
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/think-sharing-bank-data-with-the-u-s-only-affects-canadian-americans-think-again/
Nothing’s changed.
The Mythster is now working for the other side;
As “Bob” says ;
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/media-and-blog-articles-open-for-comments-part-4-of-4/comment-page-37/#comment-7933869
“July 6, 2017 at 9:11 am
Former Treasury official Robert Stack who aggressively pursued the implementation of FATCA just landed a job with the biggest of the Big-Five Tax Compliance firms. Imagine that?
Stack infamously referred to expats’ banking problems as being “myths.”
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/press-releases/robert-stack-joins-deloitte.html
Thanks for finding and posting that @Bob.
A reminder of some debunking of the mythical rationale for FATCA;
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/intfinlaw/2017/05/tax-justice-network-finds-missing-70-billion-for-trump-to-build-his-great-southern-wall-.html
http://kluwertaxblog.com/2017/04/18/15527/
Robert Stack in the news again
https://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/potentially-dangerous-ex-us-official-warns-against-tax-on-amazon-google-20180604-p4zjdz.html
This time warning the Australian government not to impose a tax on digital ad revenue from Australia.
This is pretty rich coming from the mythster:
“when they assert their right to tax they need be asking themselves, what if other countries do this to our multinationals around the world- will we be net winners or losers?”