Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 3 of 11 (Year 2016)

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

 If clicking on a comment link brings you to the wrong comment, click here  to get on the most recent page of comments.(alternatively, to reach the most recent comment page, go to  the url in the bar at the top of your browser and delete everything after http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/media-and-blog-articles-open-for-comments-part-3-of-3  )

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.  You could mention such articles in the comment stream for this page, or if I see one on another thread, I can copy the link to here. I’ll keep adding to the list, 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.

Note also: JC suggests 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.

Be sure to read the comment stream for this thread — there are usually very recent articles mentioned there that aren’t on this list yet.

2016.12.29
Switzerland moves further to end bank secrecy, Financial Times, UK.
2016.12.23
How FATCA Infringes and Trammels our Statehood, Stephen Kangal, Trinidad and Tobago News, Trinidad and Tobago.
Barclay’s chief preparing to take a stand against US regulators over unduly high fines to European banks, James Quinn, The Telegraph, UK.
2016.12.22
Canada refuses to name bank that broke money laundering rules 1225 timtes, Mike De Souze, Robert Cribb & Marco Oved, National Observer.
Financial Intelligence agency gave bankers head up about money laundering disclosure, Mike De Souza, Robert  Cribb & Marco Oved, National Observer.
2016.12.21
US citizens may pay double tax on Kahlon’s child savings program, Michael Zeff, Jerusalem Post, Israel.
Applying to be Swiss in the Trump Era, Steve Krump,  SwissInfo, Switzerland.
2016.12.20
File That Tax, Boom Chicago, YouTube, Netherlands.
Tijuana City Councilman Faces US Money Laundering Charges, Sandra Dibble and Dana Littlefield, San Diego Union, US.
2016.12.19
Senate Report Finds IRS Agents Living Large on Public’s Dime, Guillermo Jiminez, Tax Revolution Institute, US.
AG to UNC: Come to Parliament first – a Joint Select Committee to deal with FATCA . . ., Ria Taitt, Daily Express, Trinidad.
Rand Paul criticizes framework of tax reform plan, Naomi Jagoda, The Hill, US.

Articles from earlier 2016 are at this link

Articles from 2015 are at this link

Articles from 2014 are at this link

Media and Blog Articles  thread, Part 1 of 3, is at this link.

Media and Blog Articles thread, Part 2 of 3 is at this link.

 

2,818 thoughts on “Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 3 of 11 (Year 2016)”

  1. Impôts : les “Américains accidentels” pris dans un piège kafkaïen
    Pascal RichéPublié le 13 décembre 2016 à 15h30
    http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/economie/20161212.OBS2553/impots-les-americains-accidentels-pris-dans-un-piege-kafkaien.html?xtref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F#https://www.facebook.com/

    Google Translate is an option here.

    “Kafkaean trap” Robert Wood likes to allude to the tax impost as Kafkaesque or relating to Kafka.

    Taxes: “Accidental Americans” caught in a Kafkaean trap

    A recent US tax law requires all nationals to report their income. Those who were born by chance in the United States like Fabien live a nightmare.

    In the 21st century, the Joseph K of the “Trial” of Kafka is called Fabien Lehagre. He lived until then a peaceful life in Paris. But because he was born by chance in the United States, he finds himself in an appalling legal imbroglio, collateral victim of a new American law, Fatca, aimed at fighting tax evasion. The United States wants to know everything about taxpayers of American nationality based abroad. Taken in a bureaucratic nightmare, Fabien Lehagre ended up creating a collective of “accidental Americans” to bring together the citizens who live the same torments.
    If you are not American, prove it!

    Fabien Lehagre is not a fraudster. He is so little an American. A commercial executive in a company that distributes bottles of gas, he does not even speak English. Tenant, lacking any heritage, it has nothing to interest the IRS (Internal Revenue Service, the US tax). But he is “born in America”, and as such, according to the law of that country, he has American nationality.

    Until then, it was no problem for him. It was for him a mere testimony of the exotic circumstances of his birth. In the early 1980s, his father, a French waiter in a restaurant near San Francisco, met his mother, an American from Singapore. In 1984, they had a son, Fabien, but the couple separated. The man went back to France with his 18-month-old baby in his arms, and made a new life. Fabien will not have news of his mother before adolescence, and will visit him for the first time (with his French passport, his only passport) only at the age of 27 years. He will then discover that he has another half-sister, but that’s another story, do not mislead us.

    In August 2014, Fabien received a letter from his bank, BNP-Paribas. He is reported to have been reported as having an “Americanism” because of his place of birth and that he is in the target of the Fatca law. Does he confirm that he is American? If so, what is its “Social Security Number” (which is used for tax identification)? If not, can he file the certificate of loss of nationality and complete a W8-BEN form?
    Do you like this article? Subscribe to the Obs Newsletter
    “I was in the 36th below”

    Fabien Lehagre falls from the clouds, he has no Social Security number, which was made mandatory for all Americans only in 1986, nor a certificate of non-nationality. He does not even know what this law is. And plunges on the internet to understand.

    The young manager then discovers that the United States is the only state in the world to base taxpayer status on citizenship rather than residence under the principle of citizenship-based taxation and by not declaring Income in the USA, it is illegal.

    In 2010, the United States has the idea, certainly good, to twist the arm of the leaders of tax havens, such as Switzerland, to end tax fraud. On March 18, 2010, Congress passed a law, the Fatca, which provides for automatic exchange of information with other countries on the financial behavior of all American expatriates. Paris agreed in 2013 to participate in the system: Bercy transmits to the IRS the information gleaned from the Americans living on French soil. The idea is to allow the US administration to verify that all its citizens pay their taxes well. Lehagre says:
    “I discovered the problem that many Canadians were experiencing, some of them being ruined because of retroactive penalties,” federal crime. “I was really scared, I was in the 36th.

    He decides to regularize his situation, but the nightmare begins. Fabien realizes that the steps to abandon the nationality are monstrous: he must for example demonstrate, by gathering evidence on each year of his life, that he never resided in the United States …

    He knocks at various doors, secretariat at the Budget, Quai d’Orsay, parliamentarians, consulate in New York … Without great result. He is invited to “get by”, he decides to make the dead. But this case turlupine him.
    “It’s not nice to have a sword of Damocles over his head.”

    The situation is not without consequence for his personal life. What will happen if he goes to the United States? If he marries, what will be the consequences for his wife and daughter? More anecdotally, he discovers that some online banks like INGDirect or Boursorama, flatly refuse US customers, so as not to have problems.
    The lobbying challenge

    In September 2015, he chose to confront the monster and created the collective of “accidental Americans” to make their situation known and count.

    Aware of the problem, which affects hundreds of thousands of people in many countries, the IRS has put in place a “simplified” procedure to get rid of US citizenship and get a tax receipt, but you have to file bank accounts Of the last six years, to pay legal fees to be assisted (7,000 to 8,000 euros) and administrative expenses (so to say a fee) of 2,350 dollars … and waste a lot of time.

    So, Fabien Lehagre prefers to fight politically and media. His collective writes to the elected representatives (in France and abroad), alerts the media, launches a petition … A real lobbying work. The parliamentary report on the extraterritoriality of American law, signed by Pierre Lellouche and Karine Berger and made in October, mentions the fate of accidental Americans and calls on the Quai d’Orsay to take action so that Washington finally solves the problem A simple procedure for renunciation of nationality).

    But the road may still be long … Fabien Lehagre estimates the number of accidental Americans to 10,000 people in France. His collective has hitherto attracted only fifty. The others are not yet aware of their situation or prefer to stay under the radar. To live happy, live hidden…

  3. @muzzeldnomore
    I am afraid of the collapse of America. We all should be afraid. it will throw us into the biggest depression ever seen. The whole world will be affected. It will be the breeding ground for Hitlers all over the world. I am very VERY afraid of the collapse of the American empire, and maybe the whole world is. Without an alternative ( China?) people will be starving even in western “affluent” societies and things will get very ugly.

  4. @polly
    I am not sure which I fear the most, the continuing hegemony of the US or its demise.
    I grew up in London just post WW2, I remember ration books, keeping chickens in our small garden and helping my Grandparents grow all our food. Perhaps it’s time to live within our means we can’t go on living on a false economy forever.

  5. @Heidi
    I agree. And living within our means- why can’t we be grateful for what we have? It seems that those who are rich never are- which is such an amazing paradox.

  8. @iota you are the research guru. Brilliant sleuthing.

    I never expected to see this in list form as I figured it would be abolished by request and courtesy because it is a teeny blip on the radar.

    You made my weekend.

    Cheers
    George

  11. Think it means those made exempt by this rule get an extra year (2018 for Y2016) to figure out whether they qualify. Go figure.

  12. Iota and George: I’m happy to see that FATCA issues made the official “scrap-it” list for the first 100 days. I would be happier still if CBT were on that same list. I hope that Keith Redmond and the others who are going to Washington next month to testify on our behalf will stress the fact that CBT is the root issue. CBT is what *makes* FATCA a problem.

  13. @Muzlzled…..the “list” is the low hanging fruit list much that can be cut by the respective Secretaries and/or President Trump.

    You are right in regards to CBT and we can no longer go back to our ignorant but filled with bliss lives. We have looked into pandoras box…we have tasted the fruit from the tree of life……sadly.

    CBT scraping is the cause AND getting the world to thrash out what multi nationality means in the 21st Century!! You can NOT have more than one citizenship applying at a given moment in time because it creates conflict. IN Canada…a Canadian is a Canadian…………Trudeau was right he just did not understand what he said.

  14. “US President-elect Donald Trump has chosen US Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina to be his White House budget director.”

    Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) has sponsored a bill H.R. 5935 to repeal FATCA.

    Hopefully his new position will help him achieve the aim of 5935.

    Mick Mulvaney is/was also leading Republican member of The Americans Abroad Caucus of Congress.
    https://www.americansabroad.org/americans-abroad-caucus/

    IMO, Americans Abroad Caucus has largely been ineffectual and with skewed view of US persons abroad issues through within “the beltway” blinders. The Democrats have dominated membership and leadership of this bipartisan caucus.

  19. Tax-practitioner Pity Party: American Bar Association discusses “offshore issues” including Streamlined Certification – trying to figure out if the IRS is going to hit them with gigantic, life-changing, totally-unjustified 26 CFR 1.6694-2 penalties. So unfair! 🙂

    Speaking at the American Bar Association’s National Institute on Criminal Tax Fraud and Institute on Tax Controversy panel moderated by Scott D. Michel of Caplin & Drysdale in Las Vegas, IRS and DOJ officials discussed a number of topics about offshore enforcement, foreign bank issues and voluntary disclosures.
    [..]
    The panel also discussed the difficulties faced by practitioners in doing due diligence and reaching proper reporting standards for taxpayers entering the IRS streamlined program.

    Under streamlined procedures, taxpayers must certify, under penalties of perjury, that previous compliance failures were non-willful. Michel argued practitioners still struggled with what the standard was for making that judgment.

    “We all live in a tax world where we are familiar with concepts like reasonable basis . . . or substantial authority, or more likely than not. It seems to me that there is a tension here between the absolute black-and-white component of a penalty of perjury certification . . . and these sorts of traditional standards,” Michel said. “The scary thing to me, and I think a lot of others, is it is probably not good enough to have a reasonable basis.”

    http://www.capdale.com/scott-michel-comments-on-future-of-john-doe-summonses

  20. No wonder expats are renouncing and saying, “Not one more dime …” Some homelanders might well envy the expats for their option to escape, although they will never understand how difficult their escape can be or how unfair their entrapment was in the first place.
    https://taxrevolution.us/senate-report-finds-irs-agents-living-large-publics-dime/

    What once could be criticized as disregard for the American taxpayer can now only be viewed as disdain.

    More evidence of the Internal Revenue Service’s frivolous spending continues to be unearthed, and the picture it paints of the agency’s wasteful habits has gone from ludicrous to obscene.

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