I found this yesterday and thought it was interesting and worth sharing.
The Société Générale has an entire section of their Securities Services website devoted to FATCA. They are calling it the “défi américain” (the American challenge) and this seems to be an attempt to explain a few things to their clients who are clearly curious about what this all means. I think the site is well done and I hope my bank here does something similar.
I thought I would take a few moments and talk about how all these issues impact U.S. spouses of foreign nationals living outside the U.S. I’ve seen this addressed in other places but from the comments I see it’s usually about how the foreign spouse will suffer because he/she married an American. Believe me, it isn’t fun for the Americans (very often women) either.
In his book Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization Peter Spiro takes a good hard look at what citizenship is worth in the world today. He concludes (a bit reluctantly I think) that:
Becoming a citizen entitles one to little more than the right to vote, eligibility for some public benefits programs, and freedom from any threat of deportation.”
This is the conversation I had with my younger Frenchling (French/American daughter) last night after she opened her bank statment. She has a little account with our French bank that we opened to give her pocket money:
Frenchling: Mom, what do I do with this? (bank statement)
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I found this paper today as I was researching another topic for the Flophouse and the title alone, Sharing The Spoils: Taxing International Human Capital Flows, intrigued me. So I had a look (Petros has probably already read it), thought it had some interesting ideas and so I offer it up to you for your reading pleasure. After all, it is Friday (the 13th no less).
For our purposes I thought the section four on Alternative Worldwide Regimes for Individual Income Taxation starting on page 25 is worth a read:
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I suspected something like this was brewing. There is a projet de loi here in France that is quite similar to FATCA though it is limited to trusts.
You can read more here. (Article in English)
Here is a choice quotation:
Petros made some great suggestions about how to get the word out and make it stick. As I was brainstorming the other night it occurred to me that this is an election year and, if we take the right actions, we just might get some traction with some people who would otherwise happily ignore the whole business. These are 3 easy things that I have done or will do and I offer them to you as suggestions. If you have your own ideas, feel free to add them in the comments section:
Parts of this post are from a piece called Involuntary Citizenship – Here’s How Strange It Can Get that I wrote back in October for the Flophouse blog.
This is another great article that gives people a concrete example of what could happen if this nonsense continues. A lot of Europeans I talk to think it’s not really their problem because they are duals or because, even if they did work a few years in the U.S., they argue, “Well what could the U.S. government possibly do to me? I don’t live in the U.S.”
They firmly believe (and I hope from the bottom of my heart that they are right) that their government (France, Germany, U.K. etc.) would stand up for them against the U.S. But are they right to be so confident? Sokol’s article gives a perfectly mundane example of what might happen to a French citizen if the U.S. government decides he or is a U.S. person for tax purposes. And then he follows it to its logical conclusion – the European Court of Justice. Have a read and pass it along to your European friends…
In a previous post I started talking about services. I fail to understand why some folks back in the home country are so insistent that we “pay our fair share” but they don’t have an answer when I reply, “For what?”
