110 thoughts on “TODAY — LAST DAY TO SEND LETTERS”

1. “I find it deeply depressing that something so simple could be made so complex that I need to read it twice to understand what they are trying to say. Then I see that they have STILL not grasped this very very simple concept.”

   What I’ve learned, in the years since OMG:

   Nothing about cross-border taxation is simple. Which national treasury gets the tax revenue from which subset of cross-border taxpayers is constantly being contested. The language and labels are used as shapeshifting tools to further or defend one country’s interests against those of the other country, around the negotiating table. Meanings get get murky and ambiguous.

   Residence laws, especially, can get very, very complex, and not just for Americans.

   The people writing background reports for politicians may be careless about meanings, but taxwriters and tax treaty negotiators probably are not.

2. “Nothing about cross-border taxation is simple.”

   But this is simple – I don’t live there, I have no property there, I have not been there, I have no income from there, I have no connection to that country at all apart from accident of birth.

   In that case, the country has no right to terrorise me for taxes.

   This is simple and something the entire world understands with the exception of the USA and Eritrea.

3. Yes morally it’s simple, and that simplicity is recognized in the fact that the IRS doesn’t actually have the power to collect extraterritorially.

   Legally and politically, it’s not simple.

4. “As long as they can point to a source that says the US uses a norm of ‘residency’ but then apply the word to include NON-residents, and defines ‘nationality’ broadly enough to include illogical anomalies like expired (but not officially surrendered) greencard holders who aren’t citizens and who don’t live in the US and have no right to reside there, and defines citizens as ‘residents’ and includes those who don’t or have never resided in the US, it is just like the character in ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ who said;
   “…“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”…”

   Yep. Well said.

5. badger: I agree that this is very interesting:

   As a longstanding policy matter, the Treasury Department has not sought to include provisions in double taxation treaties providing for assistance in the collection of taxes, primarily due to concerns that such provisions could result in a disproportionate level of burden on the IRS.. Collection assistance provisions are not included in the U.S. model income tax convention, which is the baseline text the Treasury Department uses when it negotiates double taxation treaties.

   Collection assistance provisions cut both ways, of course. Many countries would probably like to ask the IRS to collect the taxes owed to them by US residents (actually US-resident, not pretend-US-resident). Added together, that could be a hell of a lot of requests to the IRS for collection assistance. That seems to be the aspect that the IRS is wary of on account of the “undue burden” it could involve.

   We tend to ask “Would my country be willing to collect taxes for the IRS?”

   Maybe the question should be “Would the IRS be willing to collect taxes for my country?”

6. @plaxy, back to why the report author/s chose to cite the article by
   Reuven Avi-Yonah, “International Tax as International Law,” 57 Tax Law Review 483 (2003-2004).
   https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=5025 in their explanation of international tax basis norms.

   I prefer the conclusions of this article by the same scholar;
   Avi-Yonah, Reuven S., The Case Against Taxing Citizens (March 25, 2010). U of Michigan Law & Econ, Empirical Legal Studies Center Paper No. 10-009; U of Michigan Public Law Working Paper No. 190. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1578272 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1578272

7. For anyone interested, here are several other articles to cite that support the move to a US system based on actual residency basis and not the current fictive citizenship=residency basis.
   ex.
   Blum, Cynthia A. and Singer, Paula N., A Coherent Policy for U.S. Residence-Based Taxation of Individuals (May 1, 2008). Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2008. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2188443

8. The 2010 paper is more directly applicable to the CBT/FATCA/IGA oppression, but I do find the earlier paper very interesting indeed – shows the evolution of the mess.

9. @ badger
   Speaking as an “illogical anomaly” with a non-meaningful yet resentful relationship with the USA, I thank you for at least giving me the words to somewhat define the borders of my morass.

10. Badger: If our issues aren’t addressed in whatever tax reform is accomplished this fall, I’ll be writing to the U.N. again to find out what the hold-up is on our Human Rights Complaint. I’ve found several things to bring to their attention within the documents you’ve been discovering. Thank you for posting all of this! I hope I won’t need to write a thing, but if I do, you’ve supplied a good deal of ammunition. 🙂