https://t.co/yM4UOzEDGu pic.twitter.com/R3lEmZgiS4
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) May 27, 2020
The above tweet references an article from Helen Burggraf at American Expat Finance. The article includes:
First FATCA challenge over GDPR
As reported, a U.S. born woman who has been identified only as “Jenny”, and who has been a British citizen since 2010, launched her complaint against HMRC last year, in what was said at the time to be the first legal challenge to FATCA since the GDPR came into force in 2018.
Jenny claims that by providing her personal financial information to the U.S. tax authorities in compliance with the U.S. tax evasion law known as FATCA, HMRC is violating her data protection rights, both as a British and EU citizen.
Jenny, who lives in the north of England and who has been described as married and working with deaf students at a university, where she is a research associate, is crowd-funding her FATCA challenge on the CrowdJustice.com website, where, since last September, she has managed to raise some £80,338, from 426 pledges thus far, although she is still some way short of her target of £120,000.
FATCA was signed into law in 2010 as a revenue-providing element of a domestic jobs bill known as the HIRE Act, while at the same time being intended to discourage the use by Americans of overseas bank accounts to hide their wealth.
Known officially as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, it establishes a 30% withholding tax on U.S. source income for any non-U.S. financial institutions that are found to have failed to report to the U.S. authorities the bank account details, including assets, of any of their clients who happen to be U.S. citizens or Green Card holders.
When enforced alongside the U.S. system of citizenship-based taxation, the FATCA regulations mean that an estimated 9 million U.S. citizens living outside of the U.S. are unable to avoid paying taxes to both their country of residence and the U.S., although there are some mechanisms they can use to avoid being taxed twice for the same thing on the same income.
To read the complete and comprehensive article (which includes a description of the basis for the legal challenge) click here.
Thank you @USCitizenAbroad! 🙂 My legal team has done absolutely stunning work as shown on their ‘Correspondence’ page – their letters to the ICO from the past few days are now published there as well. Thank you to all of the Brockers who have pledged so generously and to all of the Canadian activists here who initiated the fight against this injustice before anybody else was paying attention! https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/fatcahmrcprivacybreach/