Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 5 of 11 (Year 2018)

You can access all years at this link: Media and Blog Articles – Links for All Years

If clicking on a link brings you to the wrong page in the comment stream, click here to get to the most recent comments.

Media and Blog Articles

EmBee suggested that it would be good if there was a thread for new articles, so that people would be aware of where to comment.   So, I created this permanent page.   I’ll make a permanent list of links posted here and keep adding to it,  but not deleting, so we’ll end up having sort of a  “bibliography” of FATCA/CBT articles.  [Note:  Some articles are not open for comments]

For more articles on FATCA, enter FATCA into Google then click on the link “more news for fatca” just below the most recent featured article.

Notes:

From JC:   To see #FATCA on Twitter for latest breaking news.  JC finds that is quite a good source and there even are some international articles that one may read using Google Translate.   Others may help certain tweets and articles remain in elevated position by retweeting them.

From Badger:   On an important archival note, please use the Internet Archive Wayback machine https://archive.org/web/ (see bottom right ‘Save Page Now’ box to enter URLs of webpages you want saved for posterity, and try to save backup copies of articles and other items of interest in some other form – such as a datastick or external drive. Some important and very significant webpages and the fulltexts of articles are no longer available (although some can be retrieved if someone using the Wayback machine saved them).

Be sure to read the comment stream for this thread — there are usually very recent articles mentioned

2018.12.23
New bill could lessen tax woes for Canadian residents with US citizenship: but the outlook is bleak for thousands grappling with Trump’s repatriation tax, Elizabeth Thompson, CBC News, Canada.
2018.12.21
Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad Act of 2018!  Let’s Get This Passed! Anthony Parent, John Richardson, Keith Redmond, IRS Medic. US.
TTFI bill introduced today, great news for Americans living in Canada, Reddit Forum.
FATCA: Significant Relief in New Proposed Regulations, Jeremy Naylor, Amanda H. Nussbaum and Martin T. Hamilton, Mondaq.
2018.12.20
Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad Act, Democrats Abroad.
2018.12.19
TCJA and US Expats, Karen Alpert, Fix the Tax Treaty, Australia.
2018.12.18
Why Banks Have Become Judge, Jury & Prosecutor and will Shut you Down Judged Guilty for Nothing That is Actually Illegal, Patriot Rising.
20`18.12.17
IRS Issues Proposed FATCA Regulations, Adrienne M. Baker, Joseph A. Riley and Jeff J. Kang, Lexology.
2018.12.13
IRS Issues Proposed Regulations on FATCA, Other Reporting Conditions, ABA Banking Journal, US.
2018.12.11
How the IRS as Gutted, Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisenger, ProPublica, US.
2018.12.08
December 2018 International Tax Reform Updates- FATCA -GILTI – TTFI, Anthony Parent interviews Keith Redmond and John Richardson, IRS Medic. (video)
2018.12.05
Explaining GILTI – Individual Impact, Karen Alpert, Fix the Tax Treaty, Australia.
2018.12.03
Luxembourg: Exchange Of Information Vs Data Protection: A Brave New World Of Transparency, Antoine Dupuis and Guilles Sturbois, Mondaq.
2018.12.00 (December 2018 edition)
EU parliament versus FATCA, Financier Worldwide.
Newsletter, Purple Expat.

 Articles from earlier in 2018 are in the Media and Blog Articles 2018 Archive.  Links to previous years’ archives are also at that link.

1,714 thoughts on “Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 5 of 11 (Year 2018)”

  1. Keith Redmond on Facebook has a go at FAWCO:

    FAWCO’s (Federation of American Women’s Clubs Overseas) position on FATCA. Please go over to their page to comment directly on this post as they will not see it here. I really need you to speak up please! They are not understanding the serious problems with FATCA + Non-Résident Taxation.

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmericanExpatriates/permalink/962373357262070/

    Mark Fitzpatrick launches #deleteFAWCO

    Our 17 year old daughter plans to renounce when she turns 18 this year. She was rejected for renunciation in November because she’s underage. I read the response from @FAWCO and she offers this response from next generation American women overseas. #deleteFAWCO #FATCA

    https://twitter.com/zuludogm/status/978716245754372097

  3. Nononymous: “Nowhere in the Forbes article does it state that the defendants are based in London. I had to read the legal document to discover that.”

    The article also skips over the point that it was actually an FBI undercover agent who lured the FIs into “messing with FATCA”, in order to provide grounds for indictment on money-laundering charges. It was a sting. If it had been real, would breaking FATCA have led to criminal charges? Not apodictical, to say the least.

    The writer of the article is presumably a condor doing a little FATCA-scaring on a slow day.

  5. @ Fred,

    AFAIK, they use a US passport for travel.

    Note the article says, “They are issued special U.S. passports that say: “This bearer is a United States national and not a United States citizen.”

    There’s some information and history of this in DoS Foreign Affairs Manual at 7 FAM 1130 and 7 FAM 1130 Appendix B.

    “Certificates of Non-Citizen National are authorized pursuant to INA 341(b) (8 U.S.C. 1452(b)). Such certificates were issued only to persons who are nationals but not citizens of the United States, generally persons born in American Samoa or on Swains Island. These certificates are no longer issued. Instead, a U.S. passport containing a specific endorsement stating that the bearer is a U.S. non-citizen national, not a U.S. citizen is issued to these persons.”

    7 FAM 1100: https://fam.state.gov/fam/07fam/07fam1100apH.html
    7 FAM 1130 Appendix B: https://fam.state.gov/fam/07fam/07fam1300apB.html

  6. From FAWCO’s website:

    As a non-partisan organization representing the interests of all overseas Americans, FAWCO supports all efforts to eliminate or alleviate the damaging effects of FATCA. Since the very early days of FATCA, FAWCO has supported the “safe harbor” concept, which would eliminate from FATCA reporting the accounts held by overseas taxpayers in the country where they are fiscally domiciled. FAWCO’s concern is the financial, professional, domestic and personal well-being of people abroad who are being treated like “tax cheats” because of financial accounts they must maintain in their countries of residence.

    Particularly through its participation in the annual Overseas Americans Week, FAWCO continues to worked to inform US policy-makers of the harm that FATCA does to overseas Americans. To counteract this harm, FAWCO recommends the following.

    *Exempt from FATCA reporting all financial accounts held in the country in which the filer is a bona fide resident (as recommended by the National Taxpayer Advocate and the recently introduced H.R. 2136).

    * Adopt, as an alternative to FATCA, the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and now adopted in 100 jurisdictions.

    *Eliminate duplicative reporting as recommended by the National Taxpayer Advocate by developing a single reporting form, which satisfies the needs of all the relevant compliance organizations.

    * Rethink the penalties related to FATCA reporting requirements, including both the 30% withholding imposed on Foreign Financial Institutions and the punitive fees imposed on individuals.

    * Meet financial reporting obligations on Foreign Financial Institutions with the submission of 1099s that comply with US tax reporting standards.

    Seems reasonable to me. If these objectives were met, it would put a stop to the birthplace-discrimination that causes bank access problems for US-born residents/citizens in my country.

    Who would it cause a problem for?

  7. Plaxy: certainly a good plan. The Safe Harbor provision is however always a source of concern. Lots of people, notably in the EU, have accounts in other countries. If you live in Mons, Belgium, should the account from your university days in Lille, France, a few miles away, be counted as foreign? Well, it is anyway by Belgium, but should it also be reported to the USA? I.e. Safe Harbor doesn’t solve everything. Still, having home-country accounts completely exempt would probably be enough.

  8. Fred – I’m just trying to understand why FAWCO is being attacked. I understand that achieving their list of goals might not solve all existing FATCA-related problems, but would it cause new problems for anyone?

    It’s not the kind of organisation I myself would ever have found interesting, but I can’t see that they’ve done anything to deserve attack. I may be missing something?

  9. One of the obstacles standing in the way of achieving FAWCO’s suggestion that the US should drop FATCA and sign up to CRS, is the issue of discrimination on the basis of national origin, which CRS does not do.

  11. AAA in France seem quite active. Hope this will help everybody, including duals and other US Persons.

  12. Thanks for those links, Pacifica.

    Eighteen months for a ruling from the Council of France. Sept 2019.

    Jan 2019 for Canadian court case.

    Tomorrow for a decision on whether the US Supreme Court will consider the Bopp case.

    Perhaps things are finally coming to a head, on the legal front.

  13. “I’m just trying to understand why FAWCO is being attacked. I understand that achieving their list of goals might not solve all existing FATCA-related problems, but would it cause new problems for anyone?”

    http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2017/01/04/all-roads-lead-to-renunciation-fatca-same-country-exemption-edition/

    @ plaxy
    I don’t know the totality of FAWCO’s version of SCE but we had a discussion about ACA’s version and I believe the devil is in the deeper details … just how many filing hoops would be between a USP overseas and true freedom? Remember this is a group of women who want to stay attached to those precious American roots of theirs.

  14. Embee – ” the devil is in the deeper details… just how many filing hoops would be between a USP overseas and true freedom?”

    Good point, Embee. And there might be a fee. But it would still be an option that doesn’t now exist, rather than causing fresh harm.

    “Remember this is a group of women who want to stay attached to those precious American roots of theirs.”

    I think that’s true for a lot of USCs outside the US, not just FAWCO members.

  15. The FAWCO statement references the Taxpayer Advocate’s recommendation. Found this:

    Amend IRC § 1471 to specifically exclude from the definition of financial accounts subject to reporting by FFIs financial accounts maintained by a financial institution organized under the laws of the country of which the U.S. person is a bona fide resident.

    https://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/Media/Default/Documents/2015ARC/ARC15_Volume1_LR_05_Foreign-Acct-Reporting.pdf

    That would work for me.

  16. Embee – Thanks for the link to the IBS post about SCE. Very interesting. I hadn’t realised until I read that post that it was the IRS that decided that same-country accounts should be included, and issued regulations to that effect. I assumed it was in the statute. Instead, it seems it’s the IRS interpreting the law. That’s what Mulvaney and Mnuchin are currently at odds about: who should have final say on the interpretation of tax law.

    Does that mean that if the Republicans wanted to exempt same-country accounts, they could do it by tweaking regulations rather than having to pass new legislation?

  17. @ plaxy
    My guess is the Reps would have to tweak the ears of the IRS to get them to untweak their regs which interpreted badly the legislation re: same-country accounts.

  18. But it could be done? New legislation would not be necessary?

    The incoming Commissioner has expressed the view that same country accounts should not be treated as foreign.

  19. @ plaxy
    Hmmm … don’t know. However there’s much more to fix than merely same-country accounts. My worry is that if they exempt these accounts from FATCA reporting they will think that they have done enough and then CBT, FBARs, double taxation and condor-enriching, complex form filing will still be there to plague people who deserve total freedom from US tax tyranny because THEY DON’T LIVE THERE (and some never did live there and some never were USCs).

  20. That’s voluntary though, except in IGA Model 2 countries where (AIUI) some banks demand proof of IRS compliance as a condition for opening/keeping an account.

    Exempting same-country accounts from being treated as foreign would solve that problem for IGA 2 residents. And then compliance would be voluntary, as far as I can see. Am I wrong?

  21. Complying is at present “opt-in”, if you like. Those who opt to comply, do so by filing IRS forms.

  22. plaxy: “That’s voluntary though, except in IGA Model 2 countries where (AIUI) some banks demand proof of IRS compliance as a condition for opening/keeping an account.”

    I’m curious. How on earth would somebody ever prove IRS compliance? Usually the taxpayer never hears anything from the IRS except if there is a problem which would indicate they are not compliant. Supposedly one can apply for a transcript several months after filing but all that would prove is that a return was filed and received. To the best of my knowledge certainty doesn’t come until the statute of limitations has run out. That would be quite a long wait tor open a bank account.

  24. @maz, plaxy

    My understanding is, you aren’t really “proving” compliance, but showing your nervous Swiss bank a printout of a 1040 and an FBAR form to meet whatever their own internal rules demand.

  25. Probably. I don’t know. If IGA 2 residents don’t have to prove compliance to banks, so much the better.

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