Congressman Goes On Berating Rant At Ousted IRS Commissioner And Gets A Standing Ovation businessinsider.com/mike-kelly-ran… – Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.)

— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) May 19, 2013

All U.S. citizens everywhere should watch this video of Mike Kelly and Steve Miller. I predict that (as the Carpenters sang):

“We’ve only just begun!”

BEIJING, May 18 (Xinhua) — After six years in the United States, and having secured a “green card” for permanent residency, Chinese novelist and former TV starlet Wang Yang has decided to move back to China.

“America is good, but it will not give me what I need,” she says.

Wang will soon start work with a TV drama crew in Beijing on an adaptation of her latest novel “Yang Jia,” or “Marrying Across the Ocean,” depicting a Chinese woman’s love story in America.

While Wang personally wrestled with whether to settle away from China, her protagonist also goes through a similar decision-making process. Crucially, unlike many previous stories with similar topics that venerate foreign cultures when depicting Chinese lives abroad, Wang’s novel has been credited with providing a more truthful, contemporary picture.

It has made a difference by putting experiences across Chinese and U.S. cultures on an equal footing, according to literary critic Mu Gong.

Wang and “Yang Jia” are therefore emblematic of a re-balancing of assumptions on the desirability for Chinese of expatriate life. Foreign residency is starting to lose some of its luster for Chinese, with greater opportunities in their increasingly invigorated home country.

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“notamused” has asked if this, which “Johnson” found and commented on could be posted on its own. (Good suggestion, notamused! Thanks, Johnson.) Note, the important comment from SwissPinoy.

FATCA: Toward a Multilateral Automatic Information Reporting Regime

From “SwissPinoy”

@Johnson, the following part of the report is nonsense:

“Thus, renunciation only serves as a way for individuals to avoid U.S. reporting requirements and related penalties after the date of renunciation.”

It incorrectly assumes that everyone who renounces has “annual income of approximately $150,000 or a net worth of at least $2 million”

Comment on original thread from “Just Me“:

Joanna is hardly a FATCAnatic, but it would have been good if she was…

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joannaheiberg

Student at Washington & Lee University School of Law Lexington, Virginia

Do you know the date this was written and what the distribution was? She has a lot of good foot note references?

From “Johnson”

FATCAnatics propose to cut us loose:

FATCA: Toward a Multilateral Automatic Information Reporting Regime

This Note will argue that international cooperation is essential for successful FATCA implementation.

Part II will provide background information on offshore tax evasion and existing U.S. mechanisms for international tax enforcement.

Part III will explain key FATCA provisions, and

Part IV will discuss concerns regarding FATCA as originally enacted.

Finally, Part V will introduce the proposed intergovernmental approach to FATCA and argue that international cooperation and development of standardized requirements will mitigate FATCA concerns and facilitate its implementation.

Part V also argues that abandonment of the U.S. policy of citizenship-based taxation is necessary to achieve an efficient multilateral FATCA regime.

From “notamused”

@SwissPinoy
Indeed, a false assumption. To make matters worse, if I remember correctly, that particular criterium for covered expats is not $150K annual income, but rather $150K annual tax liability. Still, I think the report is overall quite good, especially since it brings many of the severe problems associated with FATCA to light.

US citizens living abroad
All customers including US citizens must be living in the USA to maintain a TradeKing account. Exceptions may be made for active military personnel stationed abroad.
TradeKing

The act of treating people unequally for living in a particular country or part of the world is listed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as being national origin discrimination.

National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

EEOC states that it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person’s national origin

Under the laws enforced by EEOC, it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.
Prohibited Policies/Practices

So, Tradeking is illegally discriminating against Americans living abroad.  Yet, when I called the the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to inquire further, I got transferred around until I got transferred to an invalid number terminating my inquiry.

In the mean time, Americans living abroad are still being denied financial services inside and outside of America due to their national origin and as a result of US policy.  The image on the left was contributed to the Economic Policy Journal by one of its readers.

…Other people who come forward aren’t even sure they’ve done anything wrong.

Marvin Van Horn and his wife live in New Zealand, where they have a checking account and retirement savings. They weren’t intentionally hiding anything from the IRS. But he heard a story on the radio about offshore tax cheats — and realized that the rules might apply to him.

So he decided to go through the IRS’s voluntary disclosure program. He learned he would have to pay back taxes for six years, which came to about $20,000. That seemed fair, he said. But then there was the penalty: $172,000.

Van Horn says the penalty would have gutted his retirement savings. So he appealed. And after 851 days (he was counting), the penalty was reduced to $20,000.

There’s a spectrum in these cases, attorneys say. There are people who went to great lengths to hide money, people who didn’t know they were hiding money, and a lot of people in between.

One other thing about the 39,000 people have come forward so far: They’re probably a drop in the bucket. Somewhere between five and seven million U.S. citizens live abroad. Fewer than 1 million of them declare offshore accounts, as required by law.

NPR

I love the comments!  As for NPR, there is much room for improvement.  It could expand on this:

Lois Lerner, the senior executive in charge of the IRS tax exemption department and the federal employee at the center of the exploding scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative, evangelical and pro-Israel non-profits, was given $42,531 in bonuses between 2009 and 2011…  Her annual salary in 2009 and 2010 was $172,200, and $177,000 in 2011 and 2012. With the bonuses, Lerner was paid a total of $740,931 for the four-year period.

Washington Examiner

With scandals like that, it is no wonder that the US government needs to heavily fine the politically unrepresented!

Based on guidelines issued by the government, those who make contributions of US$1,000 or more will be rewarded with a national decoration. Contributions of US$10,000 or more will guarantee the donor a ‘Letter of Appreciation’ from the President. Those who offer up more than US$100,000 will receive a Medal for Efforts. In addition, they will receive either an extension to their right to work abroad, or a guaranteed re-issue of their right to leave the country for business purposes.

This has resulted in increased pressure for overseas citizens to make monetary contributions, in addition to the usual taxes. According to our sources, there is a rumour spreading about how a businessman offered US$1,000,000 and received an important government position.

Read the full story at New Focus International.

We FairTax supporters have been contacted by two different gentlemen who are United States citizens who live abroad. One lives in Paris, and the other lives in Tokyo. Both support the FairTax. Why should six million US expatriates support the FairTax? And why does their support matter?

Expatriate Americans are unique in the world. United States citizens are subject to income taxation on their worldwide income even if they have no home in the United States.

This curious rule puts the United States in an exclusive club of countries. As best we know, the only other members are North Korea and the Philippines. One might understand the Philippines, who inherited our tax code when they became independent from us in 1946.

By contrast, a French citizen, or a Japanese citizen, who lives in the United States and who has no home in France or Japan has no income tax obligation to France or Japan. The French and Japanese expat, as well as the US expat, is subject to the full body of law of the host country.

Why then, should a US expat be required to file a federal tax return in addition to the return required by the host country? Is this requirement fair?

To be sure, there are provisions in the Internal Revenue Code to avoid technical double taxation. There is also a so-called “foreign earned income” exclusion of $95,100 (but that amount counts in pushing remaining income into higher tax brackets). However, the US expat gets the worst of both tax worlds.

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Hisham Matar is a Libyan writer currently living in London. His 2006 novel In the Country of Men was short-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and his essays have appeared in publications like Asharq Alawsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times.

Matar was born in New York City while his father was working with the Libyan delegation to the UN. The family returned to Libya when he was three years old but fled to Cario when he was still quite young and his father was accused of being a being a reactionary to the Libyan revolutionary regime. He moved to the U.K. in 1986, and it appears he has lived there ever since.

What made the interview with Matar interesting to me is that in spite of the fact that he’s lived most of his life outside of Libya, he self-identifies as Libyan, and I wondered, does the US government see him the same way? Or does it view him as it appears to view all those who acquire US citizenship through birth or naturalization as Americans first and foremost?

I would guess the latter although it’s completely illogical. The act of birth does not make you a citizen of anywhere except on paper. It’s your upbringing and influences that align you and strengthen the ties that we call allegiance.

And this can change as many of us who’ve emigrated know.

I have only been away from the US for six years. I emigrated to Canada with my daughter, who was four, when I met and married my Canadian husband. Until then, I had never ventured too far or for too long away from the Midwestern state where I was born. I was typical of many Americans in that respect. We simply live and die within a small radius of  where we are hatched. Americans, by and large, are a somewhat insular people.

But even so, I wasn’t typical in that I knew more about the world at large and was less blindly trusting or invested in the American paradigm than most people I knew. It should surprise no one that moving outside the country and settling down in Canada that I quickly shed much of what some might call my American identity. So much so that I regularly irritate my American friends and relatives with my take on what goes on down south anymore.

Much of the time now, I refer to myself as Canadian even though I am not yet completely a “full Canadian” as my hair stylist puts it.

It’s cute but scary the way some Canadians refer to those of us who are Permanent Residents as only half in. The implication being that we are still tied to the “old countries” and our loyalty is therefore suspect. But I understand the driving force behind it. Living permanently in another country but not taking citizenship is akin to the idea that you haven’t quite decided who you are going to be when you grow up.

My daughter has no lingering Americanism. She not only doesn’t identity with the land of her birth but is embarrassed to let anyone know that she isn’t a Canadian citizen. Frequently she queries about the status of our application,

“Aren’t we Canadians yet?” or “You’d better study for that test, Mom. I can’t be a Canadian for real if you fail the test.”

Although the US government believes it has the greater claim on her due to her birth on their soil, Canada has beat them to her loyalty by educating her and her love of her Canadian father, sisters and friends has tied her to this country in such a tangible way that her American citizenship can only ever hope to be an afterthought if that. I don’t know whether to be amused or horrified by her take on US history as taught through Canadian Social Studies and those she knows. As many misconceptions as Americans have about their own history and Canada’s history (and they are legion), Canadians have their own slightly distorted take on America.

But this brings me round again to “identity”, Hisham Matar believes himself to be Libyan because that is what he was taught, steeped in and lives today. His physical location on the planet has little to do with who he knows himself to be. Does he know that the US believes he is a US citizen first and foremost? Hard to say. It’s amazing that a country with such arrogant overreach has failed so utterly to overtly convey this to its diaspora. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t know his “obligations” in Uncle Sam’s eyes, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the reality is Matar isn’t an American. There is far more to national identity than just being born somewhere or to a certain set of parents.

It’s how you were raised and where you were raised. It’s your education and values. And for those of us who’ve traveled away and set down roots in countries where we were not born and raised – it’s a choice. You can choose to belong or not wherever you are. Countries have certainly discovered that annoying little fact of life when confronting immigrants who have no interest in assimilating and taking on a new identity and allegiance.

And so it comes down to this, we are sometimes products of our upbringing and environments, but we are not necessarily bound by the imaginary lines that governments draw on maps. Whether through inaction, circumstance or choice, our identities are our own and  cannot be dictated to us by governments no matter how much they would like to think they can be.

Tax Audits and Threats of Audits Are No Laughing Matter on.wsj.com/qoSXak- IRS not the enforcer of the Obama or any administration

— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) May 14, 2013

This must read article includes:

Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn’t possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can’t audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.

One reason why Americans don’t act like Italians is that they see the income-tax system as basically fair in execution. A tax audit or a tax-fraud prosecution is still seen, usually, as evidence that someone has done something wrong. If it comes instead to be seen as “just politics” then the moral component of the system will be gone. For the system to work, people have to believe that it is fundamentally fair.

This is why the IRS is so strict with its own employees. Paul Caron, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who writes the TaxProf blog, noted in response to Mr. Obama’s remarks that the law calls for the termination of IRS employees who make audit threats for illegitimate reasons. He suggested that Mr. Obama’s “joke” might be grounds for firing if he were an IRS employee.

He’s not, of course, but as the president his words carry much more weight and he should be much more careful. That’s particularly true given that people still haven’t forgotten about the Obama administration’s other tax issues — the appointment of Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary despite an inexcusable failure to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes while working for the International Monetary Fund, and the scandals involving Tom Daschle and others whose appointments failed. (When the Geithner issue came up, news reports indicated that IRS employees were very upset. They can be fired over a simple late filing or a failure to report a mere $500 in income, making Mr. Geithner’s “pass” on much more serious questions quite demoralizing.)