The Isaac Brock Society

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uVZiFNkDsA

Many of her colleagues speaking prior as I understand were pretty pro FATCA

Additional press release comments from ALDE group(of which Ms In’t Veld is part of)

http://www.alde.eu/press/press-and-release-news/press-release/article/member-states-must-endorse-an-eu-strategy-against-tax-fraud-evasion-and-tax-havens-41476/

Only the EU, in a leading role, can ensure genuine international cooperation in this fight“. On FATCA, he concluded: “We cannot accept the direct application of FATCA on EU territory. Rather the EU should take FATCA as an example to develop, by democratic procedure, its own system of tax data sharing rather than importing wholesale the US one, in accordance with our own standards of data protection“.

Note: Sophia In’t Veld is part of the Dutch D66 along with two other MEP’s which in turn is part of a larger group of Alliance for Liberal Democrats in Europe which published the above release. I don’t have the Dutch translation at this point but D66 came out with a much stronger statement in opposition to FATCA.

May 20, 2013 (AP)
In 1959, nearly 5,000 Japanese-Americans had their U.S. citizenship restored after renouncing it during World War II.
ABC News

What captured my interest in this little piece of history, is the common argument that an individual who renounces U.S. citizenship may never again be a U.S. citizen and that there are only one or two rare situations where such was not the case.  Not so. Of course, one who renounces US citizenship might never want to be a US citizen. However, all is relative and times change.  Nothing is consistent.  Currently, it is just as American-patriotic to renounce US citizenship, under the given circumstances, as it was for Japanese-Americans to do so during WWII.  There is nothing wrong with it and one shouldn’t refuse to renounce due to the belief that such is irreversible.  However, one should always keep in mind that Americans may not want for individuals with American heritage to live in America if they, for whatever reason, stopped playing the citizenship game for a while.  But why would anyone want to be a US citizen under those circumstances?

On this issue, I find three questions to be relevant:

• Is America worthy of your citizenship?
• Does America appreciate your citizenship?
• Does America want for you to be a citizen?

If the answer to any of these three questions is “no”, then it is unnecessary or undesirable for one to be a U.S. citizen.  Yet, If the answer to all three is “yes”, then a restoration might make sense.  Time will tell what will become of this.

http://www.ctj.org/taxjusticedigest/archive/2013/05/senator_rand_pauls_fight_for_o.php

From Citizens for Tax Justice:

Today Senator Paul is still blocking such treaties. Taking his efforts a step further, he has introduced a bill to repeal a major reform that clamps down on offshore tax evasion. That reform is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was enacted in 2010 as part of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act. Senator Paul says he opposes it because of “the deleterious effects of FATCA on economic growth and the financial privacy of Americans.”

His arguments are entirely unfounded and the only thing he is accomplishing is to help those illegally hiding their income from the IRS. FATCA basically requires taxpayers to tell the IRS about offshore assets greater than $50,000, and it applies a withholding tax to payments made to any foreign banks that refuse to share information about their American customers with the IRS.

For a country with personal income tax (like the U.S.), that kind of information-sharing is indispensible to tax compliance, as the IRS stated in its most recent report on the “tax gap”:

Overall, compliance is highest where there is third-party information reporting and/or withholding. For example, most wages and salaries are reported by employers to the IRS on Forms W-2 and are subject to withholding. As a result, a net of only 1 percent of wage and salary income was misreported. But amounts subject to little or no information reporting had a 56 percent net misreporting rate in 2006.

So why shouldn’t foreign banks that benefit from the business of U.S. customers report the assets they deposit to U.S. tax enforcement authorities? Without such reporting, people who have the means to shift assets offshore are able to evade U.S. income taxes, while the rest of us are left to make up the difference.