Final indignity perpetrated by @BarackObama admin: @USTreasury SLAMS DOOR ON SAME CNTRY EXEMPTION 4 #AMERICANSABROAD https://t.co/SbMHP8IZZX
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) January 4, 2017
You can read it at the Americans Citizens Abroad site. Highlights include:
In denying the request for SCE, the Treasury Department’s final FATCA regulations focused solely on the risk of US tax avoidance. “The Treasury Department and the IRS have also decided that the risk of U.S. tax avoidance by a U.S. taxpayer holding an account with an FFI exists regardless of whether the U.S. taxpayer holds an account in his or her foreign country of residence or another foreign country.” The regulations say nothing about the problem of lock-out. They fix only on the unquantified and un-weighted risk that what must be a relatively small population of US taxpayers residing in a foreign country and banking at their local bank might evade US tax. The regulations do not say whether, and, if so, to what extent, Treasury Department took into consideration the widely-admitted fact that FATCA continues to put the community of 8 million Americans overseas at risk of lock-out from access to financial accounts needed for the management of basic living expenses (paying bills, paying rent, receiving paychecks). The problem of foreign financial account lock-out exists, and it has been proven that the FATCA rules are one of the root causes. The Congressional Americans Abroad Caucus, the National Taxpayer Advocate, and ACA, as well as other overseas organizations, have testified to the existence of the problem and have asked for redress by the adoption of SCE. ACA believes that Treasury Department either missed the point or failed reasonably to balance the considerations.
Updates January 6, 2017: From Treasury Regulations AKA “The Horse’s Mouth”
1. DEFINITION OF U.S. ACCOUNT
Comments requested that the definition of a U.S. account exclude accounts held by U.S. individuals resident in the same jurisdiction as the FFI with which the account is held. This comment is not adopted. The U.S. federal income tax system largely relies on voluntary compliance, and third party information reporting of the financial accounts of U.S. taxpayers is used to encourage voluntary compliance. For this reason, U.S. financial institutions are generally required to report under chapter 61 U.S. and foreign source investment income paid to account holders that are U.S. individuals. However, before FATCA, FFIs (in particular, non-U.S. payors) generally were not required to report foreign source payments made to U.S. taxpayers. The information reporting required by FATCA is intended to address the use of foreign accounts to facilitate tax evasion, and also to strengthen the integrity of the voluntary compliance system by placing U.S. taxpayers with accounts held with FFIs in a comparable position to U.S. taxpayers with accounts held with U.S. financial institutions. This is the case even for U.S. taxpayers resident abroad, since U.S. citizens and U.S. resident aliens are subject to U.S. income tax on their worldwide income regardless of where they reside and regardless of whether their accounts are maintained by U.S. financial institutions or FFIs. The Treasury Department and the IRS have also decided that the risk of U.S. tax avoidance by a U.S. taxpayer holding an account with an FFI exists regardless of whether the U.S. taxpayer holds an account in his or her foreign country of residence or another foreign country.” https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/06/2016-31601/regulations-relating-to-information-reporting-by-foreign-financial-institutions-and-withholding-on
No, the administration of Barack Obama did NOT miss the point. The point is a simple one:
Time for #Americansabroad to understand. The @BarackObama admin is intent on destroying you. Renounce and rejoice! http://t.co/9KwyKQQx5D
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) February 11, 2015
Unfortunately it’s the proponents of the FATCA Same Country Exemption Proposal who are missing the point! It’s simple: “All Roads Lead To Renunciation“.
******* UPDATE THURSDAY JAN 5, 2017
US Treasury Dept ‘slams door on Same Country Exemption’ for expat Americans https://t.co/MTbVdCzl0E via @intlinvestment
— Patricia Moon (@nobledreamer16) January 5, 2017
Great article on this here Brock gets a mention (and link to earlier one)
‘Final indignity’ Among the places expats turned to vent their anger on Wednesday, as the news about the Same Country Exemption came out, was the Isaac Brock Society website, where a regular blogger who goes by the name USCitizenAbroad referred to the decision as the “final indignity perpetrated by…Barack Obama”. The Isaac Brock Society is a Canadian website that was founded in 2011 by a number of Canadian-Americans who were fed up with the way FATCA and other relatively new US laws aimed at curtailing tax evasion were costing them money and causing them problems. President Obama had signed FATCA into law in March, 2010, in the wake of the global financial crisis.
‘I came to the same conclusion as you, that all that the IRS need do is to assess penalties greater than our ability to pay and thus deprive us the ability to challenge them.
I too believe it is unconstitutional,’
Yup, and that’s why you and I aren’t judges.
‘Tax law being held as a “civil” matter. ‘
Yes, that’s why the IRS doesn’t have to give us lawyers when they rob us. But the 5th amendment prohibits deprivation of property without due process, which is why judges repeal the 5th amendment even in civil cases.
‘Another reference, which I looked for for hours yesterday but could not find, was from a recent case in which the IRS took the opposite view, and lost.’
http://procedurallytaxing.com/tax-court-holds-whistleblower-collected-proceeds-includes-criminal-fines-and-civil-forfeitures/
But section 6665 and the Tax Anti Injunction Act are not involved in that case.
@ND
“That has nothing to do with the racism that I objected to. When you say to aim complaints at Asian-American members of Congress, I say there is no call for racism in aiming complaints at members of Congress. Members who have English sounding names and other ancestries (except for Native Americans, or maybe even including them) should all be targeted with the same complaints.
Presidents with Kenyan names and German (inclduing Anglicized German) names and other immigrant languages should be targeted too.”
Canadian, German, Kenyan and Japanese are not races. Asian is a race. As a Japanese-Canadian, Animal is Asian.
@ND
“That has nothing to do with the racism that I objected to. When you say to aim complaints at Asian-American members of Congress, I say there is no call for racism in aiming complaints at members of Congress. Members who have English sounding names and other ancestries (except for Native Americans, or maybe even including them) should all be targeted with the same complaints.
Presidents with Kenyan names and German (inclduing Anglicized German) names and other immigrant languages should be targeted too.”
Canadian, German, Kenyan and Japanese are not races. Asian is a race. As a Japanese-Canadian, Animal is Asian.
@ND
“http://procedurallytaxing.com/tax-court-holds-whistleblower-collected-proceeds-includes-criminal-fines-and-civil-forfeitures/
But section 6665 and the Tax Anti Injunction Act are not involved in that case.”
That may be but they do not need to win to get what they want.
I no longer believe that they care if their actions are or are not supported by law. The law simply is not required when their action can not be challeged in court.
All they have to do is to very publicly pull the passport of one USC for failure to pay FBAR fines when it is impossible for them to pay it and all USCs abroad will get the message, do what Uncle Sam says or say “good bye” to your families. Whoever that poor SOD is will not even be able to make the arguement that it is improper to apply FBAR fines to the passport revocation law. Not being able to pay the fine, they will not have standing to challenge it. The law be damned.
I believe the correct term for hating someone from a different country just because they are from another country is “xenophobia”. 😀 Outside of hating “homelanders” and the government of the United States, I guess, I would not fall under the category of xenophobic.
My apologies: The Executive Order confining Japanese-Americans to internment camps was Executive Order 9066. My mistake.
By the way, without an Executive, how did Canada confine Japanese-Canadians to Canadian concentration camps?
When Japanese-Peruvians were confined to US concentration camps, was it the same US Executive Order? Did Peru and the US make an Inter Governmental Agreement to do it? In the 1990’s Clinton wrote an apology to survivors of US concentration camps and paid US$20,000 to each human who survived, but since Japanese-Peruvians are 25% human they got payments of US$5,000 each, though oddly they still got 100% of an apology. My acquaintance here in Japan photographed the payment but sadly I didn’t ask for a copy.
Anyway, ALL members of US congress (except those with 100% American racial ancestry) , not just those of Asian racial makeup should be complained to for their abuse of the US’s diaspora and should be subjected to taxation by their ancestors’ countries. This is why there should not be racism in our fight.
@ND
You are confusing racism and naionality AND ignoring the context of the statements made by myself and Animal’s responses to them.
He and I were not talking about complaining to members of Congress. I stated that maybe I should ask my spouse, who is Japanese, to recommend to their gov., Japan, to adopt a JAPANESE version of CBT on FATCA. Hence being limited to Japanese-Americans.
If Peru has similar nationality laws to Japan, then I suggest you direct your efforts towards someone who is a citizen of that nation to request that their gov. adopt a Peruvian version of CBT and FATCA as Animal, my spouse and myself have no say what-so-ever in what that far off nation’s gov. does or does not do.
Again, there is no need to inject racism where none exists.
“If Peru has similar nationality laws to Japan”
I don’t know if they do or not, but it doesn’t matter. When Peruvian-born people of Japanese ancestry were renditioned to the US and put in US concentration camps, it’s because US nationality laws made every person of Japanese ancestry a second-class national of whatever country their nationality was. Peru played along with the US. (So did Canada, but Canadians were interned in Canada not renditioned to the US.)
@ND
Be that as it may, that is not what Animal and I were talking about and is thus outside the scope of our discussion.