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. Badger re: ” the individual must never have held a US passport, or, if he did, it must have been for “the sole purpose of departing from the United States “,

   How would they know the “sole purpose”? Would they use lie detector tests?

2. America’s overseas voters are not impressed

   http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-campaign-expats-comment-eb03f3a2-dfae-11e5-8c00-8aa03741dced-20160301-story.html

3. The future gives us automated tax returns. Privacy rights?:
   CBC, March 1, 2016: TAX SEASON Canada Revenue Agency automates most of your return, helping tax software

   Moodys Gartner, Kim Moody: ‘The End of the Tax Return?’

4. @calgary411 – Thanks for the link. Very interesting.

   UK tax returns are very easy, and most people don’t even have to file one, so shifting the Self-Assessment returns online is a logical next step, for the UK. Sounds like Canada is on a similar trajectory.

   Seems hard to imagine the IRS ever getting to that point. Every bit of technology they touch turns to dross in their hands.

   I seem to remember, long ago in the late 50s – early 60s, before I left America, all I had to fill in was a postcard saying I accepted the standard exemptions, allowances, etc. If so – if I didn’t just dream it – the US must have had a pre-computer method of filling in income data way back then. Pity they didn’t build on that, and computerize the whole system as the technology became available.

   Or maybe I really did just dream it.

5. Does anyone have any information about this PAC?

   http://avipac.org/

   “AVI stands for American Voices International. AVI is a PAC – Political Action Committee – registered with the US Federal Elections Commission”.

   They state no objectives, no guiding principles, no strategies, who they are, or what they are. If anyone here is involved, it would be interesting to learn more.

6. We’ve read how the 2015 security breach at the IRS was 3 times bigger than originally reported but now you can make that 7 times bigger and it gets even worse …
   http://qz.com/628761/the-irs-is-using-a-system-that-was-hacked-to-protect-victims-of-a-hack-and-it-was-just-hacked/

7. If I were Canadian, I’d be in favor of building an electrified border wall. With land mines. Just in case.

   http://www.occupydemocrats.com/2016/03/02/google-searches-for-move-to-canada-increased-by-1000-after-trumps-super-tuesday-victories/

8. I’m sure I’m not alone in hearing SO MUCH chatter on various media about how many Americans will be moving to Canada if Donald Trump is elected POTUS. OK, I’m really not sure if his election would be good or bad for that country, or we Brockers and our like, but I think this provides us with a great opportunity to expose the USA’s CBT for what it is. I will be looking for any such articles and shouting loudly how USA CBT will turn all these newcomers into Trojan horses just ready to suck money out of our treasury to the benefit of the southern bully. Maybe suggest we should enact a law that they renounce their US citizenship before we accept them here….perhaps on grounds of freedom, such as they won’t be afforded the freedom of normal Canadians thanks to the unfortunate rules that come with that unfortunate citizenship. I hope others reading this will join me in this.

9. While we’re on the topic of Donald Trump:

   

10. Hillary Clinton’s likely Treasury Secretary, according to Glenn Greenwald’s site.

    https://theintercept.com/2016/03/02/larry-fink-and-his-blackrock-team-poised-to-take-over-hillary-clintons-treasury-department

    I tried searching for any statements from Larry Fink or his company BlackRock on CBT or FATCA, and found only the following 2012 testimony to the IRS outlining some of FATCA’s dangers, including its effect on Australian pensions. Not a firebrand anti-FATCA rant. But at least his company predicted some problems.

    http://www.blackrock.com/corporate/en-hk/literature/whitepaper/fatca-testimony-irs.pdf

    My initial impression is that Fink will live up to his name and, like Hillary, defend FATCA and CBT with his life, only finding ways to tweak it to favor corporations and wealthy investors.

11. @Barbara

    Nah… no need for that… when the weather dips below -20 without a wind chill factor… they will leave… I was in the US when they had a snow storm… like it was 2-3 inches… they all acted like the world was going to end… instead of snow boots… people wore runners, high heels, and regular shoes in the snow… I was puzzled… lol

12. Sounds like continuing to squeeze the squeeze!

    Just making clear that employers must file FBARS puts them in the compliance crosshairs, IMO. More career limiting, IMO.

    FinCEN Proposes FBAR Filing Relief for Bank Employees
    http://bankingjournal.aba.com/2016/03/fincen-proposes-fbar-filing-relief-for-bank-employees/

13. @Barbara
    FEC has it in its database located at http://www.fec.gov/data/Form1Filer.do?format=html
    The PAC forms list the PAC’s treasurer as Joseph M. Hilliard, a tax preparer in Sugarland, Texas and the PAC’s secondary e-mail address seems to belong to his wife. Sugarland is near Houston.

14. I signed up for the PAC. Nothing yet.

15. PAC Plot Thickens!

    https://twitter.com/kred65/status/705177349877329920

16. And Again-

    https://twitter.com/AVInterPAC/status/704963182641737728

17. I agree with PierreD. I have no wish to discourage the folks on Cape Breton Island from their attempt to attract new residents, but this is a *golden* opportunity to educate Americans and Canadians alike about CBT and FATCA, its enforcer.

    Even though this idea may have started out as a bit of a lark it’s attracted a lot of attention and we should make use of the opportunity. There was also a segment on this on last night’s Global National.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3468898/Canadians-prepare-tongues-cheeks-flight-Trump.html

18. @MuzzledNoMore

    The Canada Party mentioned in that article has been getting a lot of press lately. One of the comedians behind its effort to get Canada elected as president happens to be a USC living in Vancouver. I can’t find any private contacts for him, but I’ve just tweeted him an invitation to support ADCS @cannonwriter

19. Related to earlier comment re *end of the tax return*:

    From Tax Connections: National Taxpayer Advocate Delivers Annual Report to Congress – Focuses on IRS’s Future Plans for Taxpayer Service

    Reduced Service Levels. The Advocate expresses particular concern about IRS intentions regarding what is not stated in the plan.  “Implicit in the plan – and explicit in internal discussion – is an intention on the part of the IRS to substantially reduce telephone and face-to-face interaction with taxpayers,” the report says.  “The key unanswered question is by how much. . .It is incumbent upon the IRS to be much more specific about how much personal taxpayer assistance it expects to provide in its ‘future state.’”

    The report says the IRS appears to presume taxpayer interactions with the IRS through online accounts will address a high percentage of taxpayer needs, enabling it to curtail existing taxpayer services without significantly impacting taxpayers.  The Future State plan also calls for expanding the role of tax return preparers and tax software companies in providing taxpayer assistance – an approach that likely would increase compliance costs for millions of taxpayers who now obtain that assistance from the IRS for free.

    The IRS Future State plan could transform the role the agency has long played in helping taxpayers comply with their tax obligations, the report says.

    …

    In releasing the report, Olson emphasized that Congress has repeatedly shown support for high-quality taxpayer service.  In the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, Congress directed the IRS to “review and restate its mission to place a greater emphasis on serving the public and meeting taxpayers’ needs.”  Added Olson:  “The fact that Congress just last month provided the IRS with an additional $290 million in funding for taxpayer assistance and codified the provisions of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, including The Right to Quality Service, demonstrates that Members of Congress continue to believe taxpayer service should be strengthened, not reduced,” Olson said.

    …

    Data Security Concerns. Olson also warned about the consequences of giving tax return preparers more access to taxpayer accounts.  “When you give that access to unregulated preparers or to other third parties, I have significant concerns.  We already see the problems in this population of preparers relating to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), where certain unregulated, untrained preparers prey on vulnerable taxpayers.  Why would we want to give these preparers even more access to taxpayer information?  And yet, if we don’t provide these preparers access to taxpayer accounts, it is very likely the tens of millions of taxpayers who use these preparers won’t be able to or won’t want to utilize their own online accounts, thereby carving a big hole in the IRS’s online strategy.  Thus, through a single-minded emphasis on online accounts, the IRS creates a situation where it will face enormous pressure to open up taxpayer account access to unregulated return preparers.”

    …

    National Taxpayer Advocate to Hold Public Hearings on Taxpayer Service Needs.  “For the IRS to do its job well, it must start from the perspective of what government is about – namely, it is of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Olson wrote.  “The government is funded by taxes paid by the people.  Therefore, the future state vision of the IRS needs to be designed around the needs of the people.”  To assist the IRS in developing a plan that is responsive to the needs of U.S. taxpayers, Olson announced plans to conduct public hearings around the country in the coming months to which she plans to invite groups that represent the interests of individual taxpayers (including elderly, low income, disabled, and limited English proficiency taxpayers), sole proprietors, and other small businesses as well as Circular 230 practitioners and unenrolled tax return preparers to describe what they need from the IRS to help them comply with the tax laws.

     

20. India says that the US will be fully reciprocal with data. How can they say this:

    http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/us-to-have-full-reciprocity-with-india-on-tax-info-under-fatca-116030300665_1.html

21. Looks like it’s just an inaccurate headline. The US letter apparently only promises that the US will “move towards” full reciprocity.

22. I guess the gazillion dollar question is how long other nations will tolerate the US’s current speed of “moving toward” providing reciprocity.

23. @JC

    I’ve tried various gateways and can’t seem to get that ABA article to open. Can you?

24. Absolutely incorrect / VERY MISLEADING headline!

    Moving toward reciprocity for Canada too: http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2014/04/25/kevin-shoom-testifies-before-senate-national-finance-committee-on-tuesday-on-fatca-bankers-come-wednesday/comment-page-4/#comment-1605977

    – I think it was Brison as well who asked about protections of privacy once in the US. Ernewein (Brian Ernewein, General Director, Tax Policy, Finance Canada ) admitted that there is nothing Canada can do, it is all about whether we trust the US and we believe that we can trust our treaty partner. He did not get into the fact that there is Homeland Security, Patriot Act etc, that the IRS is not getting approval from Congress and this has no status.
    – fairly frank admissions of lack of reciprocity but Ernewein game sought to defend the idea that some of this could be helpful for Canada eventually (I can’t believe nobody pressed them on the extreme lack of progress in getting reciprocity to happen and the low prospects for this administration of ever getting it).

    and the Minutes: http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/sen/committee/412%5CNFFN/10EV-51378-E.HTM

    Mr. Ernewein: Thank you. I gave a presentation I hoped was brief yesterday — and I will make it even more brief today — trying to situate what the implementing legislation is seeking to implement and the backdrop to the agreement we have with the U.S. Indeed, this is about FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, part of a U.S. act of Congress from 2010 scheduled to take effect in July this year.

    If there were no other intervening events, FATCA itself would require non-U.S. financial institutions — in Canada’s case, Canadian banks and other institutions — to sign agreements with the Internal Revenue Service under which those Canadian financial institutions would have to undertake due diligence; they would have to look through their customers and identify those who had apparent U.S. connections and report on those U.S. customers to the Internal Revenue Service.

    If they identified U.S. persons among their clientele, they would be required to withhold 30 per cent on the payments of those account holders or to potentially close their accounts in the event of non-compliance. If a Canadian financial institution or any other country’s financial institution decided not to enter into such an agreement with the IRS, they would be subject to a 30 per cent withholding tax on all payments made to it or its account holders who have a U.S. source.

    That raised a number of concerns for Canada and for other countries. In Canada’s case at least — although this is true for other countries as well — there was a concern about the consistency of such a U.S. law with Canadian privacy laws. Obviously, the potential application of the 30 per cent withholding tax would have been a problem. The possible requirement to close accounts was problematic both from a regulatory perspective as well as from a conflict-of-law issue; we have laws that require account opening in certain circumstances, and those would be in conflict with U.S. laws that could require them to be closed. Overall, there is just a high compliance burden with the potential application of these rules to all Canadian accounts, at least those above a certain dollar threshold.

    So without an agreement of any sort or some alternative, FATCA would have been unilaterally imposed in Canada under U.S. law — or, effectively, Canadian financial institutions would have been subject to it or would have had problems if they failed to comply with it. So the Canadian government and other governments sought to convince the U.S. to try another approach. In particular, we and other countries suggested that it would be sensible to have reference to and rely upon the existence of provisions in our and other countries’ tax treaties relating to exchange of information, which already facilitate the collection of information by our revenue authorities for possible access by our treaty partners, and of course vice versa.

    After long negotiations, that is what the intergovernmental agreement that the budget implementation bill seeks to implement does. Under the intergovernmental agreement — I’m sure I’ll fall into the parlance of IGA — Canadian financial institutions would be required to report on their account holders not to the IRS but to the Canada Revenue Agency under implementing legislation that’s in the bill before you. The Canada Revenue Agency would then be able to rely on the existing exchange-of-information provisions in the Canada-U.S. treaty and the authority for the exchange of information under the existing provisions in the Income Tax Act to transmit that information to the U.S., to our treaty partner.

    We believe the benefits relative to FATCA are several. There is no direct reporting by Canadian financial institutions to the IRS; any exchange of information would be subject to the safeguards protecting the use of that information under the Canada-U.S. treaty; it turns off the U.S. 30 per cent withholding tax; it eliminates the requirement for financial institutions to have to ever close accounts; and it includes a number of important exemptions, both for small financial institutions and for types of accounts, that reduce the compliance burden associated with the agreement.

    Also, there are reciprocal benefits for Canada in terms of additional information being collected by the U.S. for Canada’s revenue authorities.

    Finally, I will say we think it’s consistent with subsequent developments — that is, subsequent to the enactment of FATCA in 2010, at least — where G20 has taken the lead in trying to develop a common reporting standard for automatic exchange of information.

25. @Neill

    As long as foreigners have funds in the US…. they won’t be found out…. all they need is a US address… that is easy to do…. if u have big money…. u can hide behind a shell corp or a trust…. there are many ways for them to hide their funds in the US… in plain sight….

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