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

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

1. Excellent piece so thanks for the link , bubblebustin.

   As well excellent was her previous one: FINDING OUT I WAS A 23 YEAR-OLD US TAX “DELINQUENT”.

   I can’t locate where I read the account of how this young woman who has a blog, http://thedualist.net/, *found out, i.e. had her own OMG moment* (handled with much greater finesse than mine). Both of these WOULD be a fine addition to the resources at Brock.

2. @Bubblebustin, @calgary411

   I’ve created a new post to highlight The Dualist’s story:

   http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2016/02/14/a-minnows-tale/

3. Great – thanks, Deckard!!!

4. @ Jefferson D Tomas, Dual National, SwissPinoy
   RE: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/commentary/the-china-post/special-to-the-china-post/2016/02/06/457873/Congress-pulls.htm#comments
   It looks like either a long moderation period or comments are closed on that China Post article. However, I’m still hoping that maybe on Monday your excellent replies to JKay@ will appear. Those filing is easy, it’s your duty, blame the victim, comments really need a reality check.

5. Long shot, but could someone if so inclined please post a comment at this site on FATCA with a request that readers consider donating to fund our Canadian lawsuit at http://www.adcs-adsc.ca ? I don’t do facebook.

   Better to fund our lawsuit or send your monies to Greenback?

   http://news.co.cr/fatca-frustration-could-expat-voting-impact-the-us-election/44770/

6. Stephen:

   I see that “Laura Wilson” has just done so! 🙂

7. @Embee, you ask:
   IF the proposal re: Accidental Americans is adopted would Ginny and Gwen lose standing in our Charter Challenge? What would Joseph Arvay do then?

   I do not believe so. Our suit has never been about whether or not we have a right to renounce, in a hard or simpler fashion. We are suing Canada for breaching our charter rights etc for agreeing to enter into this disclosure of our information , as well as the information of those associated on accounts with us, thus treating us a second class citizens or residents. Thus the sec.15 argument etc.
   I still have not been able to give my husband, born in Canada, an answer as to why his banking information gets sent to the USA. That’s also a breach of his Charter rights. sec 07.

8. Complaining about expats can only spend 35 days int he US before Obamacare gets them:

   http://www.gocurrycracker.com/obamacare-expats-and-visits-home/

9. Makes the CRS seem like a total hack job:

   http://www.legalbusiness.co.uk/index.php/lb-blog-view/5390-comment-privacy-v-transparency-withers-noseda-on-how-the-incoming-oecd-tax-rules-opening-a-new-battle-front

10. The moderation blockage has cleared and our Brockers’ comments are now appearing at the China Post article. I don’t like that site’s posting requirement which puts most of your e-mail address in sight.

11. A suggestion HK will have it’s own FATCA because they copy everything from the US.

    http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1913283/why-hong-kong-tax-compliance-act-may-be-closer-you-think

12. See the comment by “Blue” under the South China Morning Post article, as to why Hong Kong would never have a FATCA-like law. Foremost is HK’s territorial tax system; what advantage on earth could HK claim by having information about foreign accounts? The author of the article couldn’t even get the facts straight about US renunciation: claims it’s $2000 “up front” and the requirement to pay taxes for seven years thereafter. Stupid, pointless article not worth the pixels it occupies on screen.

13. @Barbara,
    >Foremost is HK’s territorial tax system

    That hasn’t stopped load of countries creating their own FATCA via CRS. They want their residents with foreign accounts.
    >requirement to pay taxes for seven years thereafter
    The tax treaties do give the US 10 years to mess with those who expatriate if they so wish.
    >claims it’s $2000 “up front”
    You’re point is that it’s more than that or that they rounded it down or what?

14. @Barbara

    Well, actually, there was one unique and quite interesting reference in that SCMP article that hasn’t shown-up anywhere else yet that I’m aware of:

    Why do I claim the Fatca is coming to Hong Kong? Academics have intensively studied “institutional isomorphism” between countries. The fancy name basically refers to the foreign penchant for copying US laws and practices.

    There’s a topic worth pursuing, if only to try to better understand why so many countries so quickly capitulated to FATCA, signed various IGA’s and willingly gutted their own domestic laws to suit their American masters. It’s interesting to know that sociologists have an actual term, “institutional isomorphism”, for what we regular schmucks usually describe as “brain-dead lemmings following each other over the FATCA cliff.”

    For those so inclined, here are a few links to this rather esoteric topic:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism_(sociology)
    https://www.ics.uci.edu/~corps/phaseii/DiMaggioPowell-IronCageRevisited-ASR.pdf
    http://www.duplication.net.au/ANZMAC09/papers/ANZMAC2009-041.pdf

    Here’s a quote from the third paper in the above list that gives a bit of a flavour:

    Isomorphic Pressures impacting on Organisational Service Orientation
    Organisational isomorphism refers to the assimilation of organisations that co-exist in similar environmental conditions (Dacin, 1997; Deephouse, 1996). One of the most influential articles in this field of the literature is that of Di Maggio and Powell (1983) (Mizruchi and Fein, 1999). They identified three isomorphic processes which inspired a lot of subsequent research. Coercive isomorphism is a response to pressures from other organisations the organisation is dependent on, as well as the pressure to conform to expectations of society. Normative isomorphism refers to organisational change as a response to exchange with peer organisations and professional associations. Therefore, isomorphism occurring on the basis of such pressures is associated with professionalism. Mimetic isomorphism occurs if the organisation is aspiring to mimic the performance, structures and practices of other organisations. This is a response to situations of uncertainty in which management is under pressure to improve performance, but does not know how to reach this objective.

    Simply put, most countries around the world still treat the US as if they actually know what the hell they are doing and then slavishly copy them, whether to their own detriment or not. Meanwhile, the US concludes that they must indeed be doing something right, since everyone else is so busily copy/pasting their “best practices”. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the US, in the context of FATCA, is being flattered waaay out of proportion to what they deserve.

15. @Deckard

    It’s interesting to know that sociologists have an actual term, “institutional isomorphism”, for what we regular schmucks usually describe as “brain-dead lemmings following each other over the FATCA cliff.”

    LOL! Thanks for injecting a bit of humour into my day. I never really understood sociologists, now I know why.

16. Speaking of institutional isomorphism, here’s the latest on the OECD’s CRS (Common Reporting Standard, aka “Bride of FATCAstein”):

    http://www.legalbusiness.co.uk/index.php/lb-blog-view/5390-comment-privacy-v-transparency-withers-noseda-on-how-the-incoming-oecd-tax-rules-opening-a-new-battle-front

    The standard borrows heavily from the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was introduced in the US in 2010 to capture worldwide tax information on American taxpayers. The CRS has a much more ambitious scope, however, and modelling the standard on the FATCA rules has created problems for implementing it in Europe.

    FATCA was written using obscure tax jargon and complex drafting techniques designed to fit with the US tax system. As a result of the OECD’s copy-paste approach, European countries now have to deal with complex conceptual difficulties and a sprawling document that refers to such things as ‘FIs’ (financial institutions), ‘NFEs’ (non-financial institutions), ‘passive NFEs’ (‘NFEs that are not active NFEs’) and ‘active NFEs’ (‘NFEs that are not passive NFEs’). If that were not enough, the commentary published by the OECD is full of discrepancies and U-turns.

17. Not sure what crack Bryane Michael is smoking. HK has no capital gains tax, no interest tax, the estate tax was abolished more than a decade ago, there’s a profits tax exemption for funds which aren’t managed from Hong Kong, and there’s precisely zero interest anywhere on the political spectrum in changing any of the above. The Inland Revenue Department has precisely zero interest in foreign bank accounts.

    Hong Kong signed an IGA (type II, not type I) because we were backed into a corner with the 30% sanctions, and Beijing decided not to protect us (the way they protected us from being named on the OECD tax greylist back a few years ago) because they were seduced by the siren song of reciprocity.

    Most people in HK are inured to — or directly benefit from — the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) types figuring out creative new ways to socialise their costs and privatise their profits, so no one cares at all about that angle against FATCA. And no one at all cares about the effects of FATCA on U.S. citizens; there are basically no accidentals here, only expats who refuse to naturalise and returnees who were too dumb to pick Canada or Australia instead of the US as their second passport escape route back in the 1980s (and obviously, the HK government does not give a damn about either group).

18. Eric states far more eloquently what I was stutteringly trying to say. Yes, Hong Kong does tend to model many of its own laws and standards on ones it picks and chooses from the UK, EU, and USA. But to give them credit, they tend to pick the ones best suited to local needs. Environmental and product safety regulations, for example, are mostly based on European standards, not American. Banking regulations, from what I can tell from when I lived there, are a hodge-podge of UK and US standards. I never saw any knee-jerk reaction to emulate the USA across the board. Thank God for that.

    As for the complete lack of need for a Hong Kong FATCA, I might add that Hong Kong SME owners are unlikely to go through the trouble of laundering their HK-derived gains through overseas tax havens, since where on earth are they going to find lower taxes than in HK? Sure, they can open BVI LLCs and pay no corporate tax, but the point is that there’s nothing illegal about that in Hong Kong, and it isn’t a practice that has any significant effect on government revenues. The amount of tax revenue already being collected from income tax, stamp duties, and property taxes, produces embarrassingly large surpluses every year. So a FATCA-type law there makes no sense for anybody in Hong Kong, least of all the HK Inland Revenue Department.

    So I think this writer was just filling space in the increasingly worthless South China Morning Post and talking out of his sphincter with figures about “seven years” of taxes after expatriation and the $2000 fee.

19. Analysis of offshore voluntary disclosure programs:

    https://tarc.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/businessschool/documents/centres/tarc/publications/discussionpapers/Voluntary_disclosure_schemes.pdf

20. @Neill

    Wow, that paper looks more like Einstein’s The Principle of Relativity. Seriously.

21. And they never distinguish between the US ‘offshore’ – in which the local accts of >6-7 million living (and often born) outside the US are absurdly classed as ‘offshore’ in relation to the US – which as we know is the center of the universe. The usual BS where they don’t examine their flawed underlying assumptions – and compare ‘offshore’ in USspeak as equivalent to ‘offshore’ for everyone else.

    So when they put people into the Honest vs. Dishonest categories, they lump in those with local NON-US accts with the ‘offshore’ dishonest ones – since we have ‘chosen’ to hold our local assets outside the US -because we ourselves are outside the US – rather than the fictional ‘resident’ status the US assigns us for their own convenience – creating and perpetuating an impossible absurdity.

    And these authors go through all those diagrams and abstractions without examining the very glaring most basic problem with their terms of reference?

    Its enough to make one weep at the Alice in Wonderland ignorance.

22. @badger — exactly. I am so sick of seeing articles (both pseudo-academic and in the media) that fail to distinguish between the US witch hunt for US persons living throughout the world and the (arguably legitimate) interests of countries that tax residents on worldwide income (RBT). Search the document for the word “resident” — doesn’t occur. Search for the word “citizen” — three places implying that the UK is searching for citizens with accounts overseas rather than residents.

23. Bloomberg editor draws parallels between US and Eritrean tax practices:

    http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-17/citizenship-has-its-benefits

24. @BC_Doc

    This definitely wins the most useless article of the week award. Worse, how utterly pathetic that Eritrea is only mentioned to somehow provide justification for America’s immoral practice of CBT (gee, if two whole countries out of the entire world are doing it then it must be ok).

25. IR-2016-26 Is talking about the taxpayer advocate holding an open to the public event on Fed 23 in DC.
    Anyone in that hell hole could add your foreign worries to the mix.

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