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. Complicated citizenship laws, or not, this from another part of this world – Russia. Interesting.

   http://forward.com/news/world/342136/russia-quietly-strips-emigres-of-dual-citizenship/?utm_content=daily_Newsletter_MainList_Title_Position-1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New+Daily+2016-06-12&utm_term=The+Forward+Today+Monday-Friday (that one commenter says is not true)

   related to:

   http://rbth.com/society/2014/08/12/hiding_dual_citizenship_now_a_criminal_offense_in_russia_38929.html

2. Note at the end of this exchange were a tax pro says even they can’t really handle all the complications of foreign issues:

   http://www.taxprotalk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6856&sid=681a96cee107548d1d0dd332ee48e1ec

3. From a footnote in Neill’s taxprotalk link:
   “America has the simplest tax system in the universe; worldwide on everything – forever”.

4. @Watcher
   I am sorry to hear that you were affected by the HEART Act. Sticking bad funding mechanisms in to fund worthy causes seems to be a Rangel specialism.

   Perhaps the clearest proof that Rangel is a really bad legislator is that the House has only censured 23 representatives in its history and one of them was him. He was cut a bit of slack at the time because he wasn’t supposed to run in 2012, except he did. He should have retired long ago,but had lots of clout as a senior member of a powerful committee, which helped him get FATCA through, even though it is not a well-targeted piece of legislation.

5. CRA shared information on smaller bank accounts with IRS
   Contrary to FATCA, accounts under $50,000 have been disclosed
   Elizabeth Thompson June 15th 2016

   http://ipolitics.ca/2016/06/15/cra-shared-information-on-smaller-bank-accounts-with-irs/

6. @JC

   Elizabeth Thompsoms raises some interesting points, especially how the CRA will choose to conduct itself when given unprecented access to the personal banking information of Canadians. We’ve already been told by the CRA that they will use the information it gets for its own purposes.

   Senator Carl Levin complained that the $50K threshold is problematic in that banks don’t communicate with each other, allowing account holders to break up their balances in order to stay below the $50K threshold.

   http://blogs.angloinfo.com/us-tax/2014/03/17/how-to-avoid-fatca-tips-from-us-senate-subcommittee/

   If Treasury had really been thinking when drafting the IGA’s, they would have also had the CRA seek us out through our SIN’s, rather than leaving it entirely up to the banks. From an article on how the CRA can freeze your bank account for taxes owed in Canada:

   “When you opened your bank account, you were asked to provide a Social Insurance Number. This number confirms that you are a Canadian resident. It also provides a database that the CRA can tap into to find out where you bank and your account numbers. The CRA can also get this information from any cheques you have sent to them as payment of tax balances. And if you signed up for automatic deposit of tax refunds or social benefits payments – the CRA already knows where you bank.”

   http://www.dioguardi.ca/blog/yes-the-cra-can-freeze-your-bank-account-and-once-theyve-got-your-money-good-luck-getting-it-back.html

   Seems far fetched? Our government already embarked down that slippery slope for giving the CRA access to our bank account information without a federal court order in the first place. Privacy Commissioner Therrien expressing concern about about what the CRA does with the information is like knowingly hiring a pedophile to work in your daycare and hoping s/he behaves him/herself.

7. @Bubbles, in the UK your national insurance number record also has your place of birth. And….if the UK stays in the EU, the EU is planning on an EU wide taxpayer number that will no doubt have place of birth.

8. @George

   Place of birth is required on applications for Social Insurance Numbers in Canada.

   I wonder if they’d accept “Mordor”.

   http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eforms/forms/nas-2120-(01-15)e.pdf

9. An opportunity to educate readers about the cost of FATCA and Canada’s loss of sovereignty.

   Canada’s major banks hiking fees while pulling in big profits:

   http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/banking-fees-profits-1.3629701

10. My thanks to Elizabeth Thompson for her article in iPolitics. Looks like some of her commenters need an education. If the comment section allows it, maybe some “swatters” can provide links to some of the excellent “educational material” here at Brock and elsewhere.

11. Re: introduction of Republican planks to back territorial based taxation and removal of FATCA.
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/citizenshiptaxation/permalink/1074230462666701/

    Resolutions by the Republican National Committee were passed in 2014 supporting these.

    From Solomon Yue: (Difference between RNC resolution and RNC resolution passed by 2016 Republican National Convention)

    A RNC resolution passed by 186 RNC members is an important political document. However, a RNC resolution adopted by the entire 2016 Republican National Convention is a political cornerstone because our Presidential nominee has to run on the platform. We already got Trump campaign to work with us on our platform project (see Washington Times article below). Trump will support our platform.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/13/donald-trump-promises-to-embrace-conservative-gop-/

    Thank you.
    Solomon Yue

    Republican National Committeeman for Oregon

12. @Publius

    Thank you for the thoughts. With the benefit of some years distance I can see that I came off extremely well relative to many, including most here. At least I was able to swerve out of the way of this ridiculous law before it passed. The cost was a hastily arranged trans-pacific home move and some major stress and anxiety episodes, but it could have been worse. Ditching a green card was, and still is, free to do, and in the UK is handled purely by mail. My employer is multi-national so I kept my job; they even paid relocation, which is nice of them. And aside from a ten-year shadow period during which I have to file annual US non-resident alien and “expatriation” tax returns(*) there are no other lingering financial effects, just lingering psychological ones.

    (*) Only US source income and capital gains is taxable to the US on these returns. It is easy to arrange that I have none of these, so each return I file is a zero one. A waste of time for both me and the IRS, then.

13. FATCA discussed in Lebanon, on spectrum of US banking sanctions used as US foreign policy levers (and “the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers and enforces sanctions related to US foreign policy goals.”) ;

    ‘Hizbollah bombs won’t beat the banking system’
    Michael Young
    June 15, 2016
    http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/hizbollah-bombs-wont-beat-the-banking-system

    ……”…The main instrument of pressure in FATCA is relevant to the HIFPA debate. If banks fail to report on their American account holders, even accidentally, the US authorities are entitled to withhold 30 per cent of dollar transactions relating to that account. As a consequence, Lebanese banks, like those everywhere, have scrambled to comply with FATCA, even though they have incurred high costs to do so.

    In addition, banks have been compelled to introduce much more intricate know-your-customer procedures, to ensure their clients are not hiding their American nationality, or using non-American family members to conceal money. Opening an account in Beirut can now take a very long time because banks are invariably erring on the side of caution.

    Banks’ behaviour

    The banks’ behaviour on FATCA, born of fear, is a good indicator of what Hizbollah is facing. Banks, almost by definition, are risk averse, and to avoid the possibility of being seen as non-compliant, they have usually adopted an attitude that goes above and beyond what is necessary….”…

    Whole article interesting, as it demonstrates that the US uses FATCA, and other sanction based programs like HIFPA (“US legislation known as the Hizbollah International Financing Prevention Act of 2015 ” to accomplish a variety of goals by denying access to the US financial system/market.

    Given that a Lebanese bank was recently bombed, one wonders what happened to its records identifying USperson accountholders, including their addresses and other contact information. Exactly how secure should USpersons in Lebanon feel after the bank was compromised?

    For more information about the US Treasury; Terrorism and Financial Intelligence;
    Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) https://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-structure/offices/Pages/Office-of-Foreign-Assets-Control.aspx

    FATCA is just another USweapon of financial destruction held at the heads of Canada and the other countries who were forced to sign via extortionate threats of unprovoked sanctions. Is it not shameful that Canada and the rest of the world would submit to the US threat in the FATCA instance of “information exchange” and US extraterritorial taxation when it is so obviously a close cousin to the other US Treasury financial sanctions programs that are supposed to be targeting terrorism?

14. Don’t see a way to comment, but here’s another article downplaying the numbers renouncing. Mentions FATCA several times but not completely accurately. Also, like many such articles, never acknowledges that many US citizens were BORN outside the US – and are US citizens by parentage. Mostly characterizes them as US company employees, students, etc. As if there are no long term expats or emigrants or others claimed as US taxable citizens who never lived in the US, or left as infants, or were border babies.

    At least it doesn’t portray us as fleeing tax evading billionaires, and notes the compliance costs and banking problems …..

    http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-15/americans-are-not-abandoning-the-u-s
    ‘Americans Are Not Abandoning the U.S.’
    June 15, 2016 11:28 AM EDT
    By
    Barry Ritholtz

15. Numbers seem more interesting if take a period such as 4 or 5 years then 20,000 plus. That article like many was done without much research.

16. There’s an email for the Bloomberg articles author, so I wrote to him. In closing, I said that he’s correct in saying that Americans are not abandoning the US – the US abandoned us.

17. Comments are open on the Yahoo version of the Bloomberg article. .. 301 comments so far. Yahoo sign-in required. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-not-abandoning-u-152833498.html

18. The ABC’s of PFIC’s:

    …”Generally, mutual funds are treated similar to a partnership with respect to income and gains in the fund. The income is passed on to the shareholders in proportion to their holdings and reported to the IRS by the mutual fund. The IRS pairs up the information on the investor’s return with that filed by the fund. Unlike domestic mutual funds, the IRS is not able to keep an eye on foreign investment companies or mutual funds. The foreign mutual funds do not want to have anything to do with the IRS either. Hence, the burden of reporting the income and balances in these offshore investment companies falls on the investor.”…

    …”The PFIC Taint
     
    The rules regarding taxation of income and gains from PFICs are onerous to say the least! The logic clearly is to deter US persons from using PFICs as an investment fund. If a mutual fund is a PFIC, US citizens or persons who are shareholders are subject to the most severe tax treatment of all on any distributions from the PFIC, unless one of the following cases are met:

    * -The PFIC elects to be subject to SEC and IRS reporting requirements.
    * -The US shareholder makes one of several elections to pay tax on the undistributed income of the PFIC.
    * -The PFIC is listed on a national securities exchange and the shareholder elects to pay tax on any increase in the market value of shares from one year to the next.”…

    https://www.taxconnections.com/taxblog/foreign-mutual-funds-the-horror-story/

19. Comparisons between US corporations and US citizens abound in this piece that’s refreshingly critical of US lawmaker’s efforts to stop US corporate inversions:

    “Berlin Wall”
    “Hotel California”
    “Doubled down”

    …”Distilled to its basics, the current Treasury policy is both bullying and wrong-headed. Treasury has signaled, through three aggressive announcements over the past 18 months,2 that it will do all it can to stop U.S. corporations from leaving—even when the law is not necessarily on the Treasury’s side.

    Some people think current U.S. policy is accurately described using a “Hotel California” metaphor—you can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave—but the better analogy, precisely because it so clearly illustrates the melding of bad policy and all-but-certain failure, is the Berlin Wall. Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall in 1961 because growing hordes of East Germans were fleeing, and it grew increasingly awkward to try and defend the workers’ paradise of the Eastern Bloc when large swatches of workers were intent on bailing out. So too with U.S. tax policy: Treasury thinks the natural answer to the fact that many U.S. corporations want to escape the U.S. is to make them stay unwillingly, by building the corporate tax equivalent of the Berlin Wall.”

    http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=499700&email_access=on

20. Thank you badger for that latest anti-FATCA piece from Michael Young. For those not familiar with him, here are others dating back to 2012:

    http://michaelyoungscolumns.blogspot.ca/2014/07/imperial-irs-how-fatca-forces-lebanon.html

    http://michaelyoungscolumns.blogspot.ca/2012/12/fatcas-security-problem.html

21. Hillary would have some of us paying a whopping 43.4% tribute to the US on the proceeds of the sale of homes here in Canada:

    http://www.grantthornton.com/~/media/content-page-files/tax/pdfs/tax-flashes/2016/Tax-platform-comparison-60616.ashx

22. Deedee Gierow: JC Citizen DA presents a new platform every 4 years. The 2016 platform has been written and now is being edited. It is a huge job that has required hundreds of volunteer hours. It will hopefully be available within 2 or 3 weeks.

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmericanExpatriates/permalink/613865528779523/?comment_id=614064635426279&reply_comment_id=615163938649682&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D

23. Bubblebustin: Thank you for posting the information about the candidates’ positions. It is the first evidence I’ve seen regarding Trump’s tax platform. I noted that both the candidates’ international tax policies listed in the Grant Thornton table are, apparently, addressed solely to the corporate situation.

    Why, why, why, after 5-years of hew and cry from all of us … after numerous tax forums, academic papers, newspaper articles, lawsuits and formal submissions to government committees … why why, why are the candidates not addressing the concerns of individuals? The ordinary, every-day citizen is far less able to cope with the abusive tax laws currently in place than the corporations are, with their legal teams and their accounting staff. Why, why, why?

    What is it that we have to do to be heard?

24. @MNM

    You and others will recall that were explicitly told that our issues would not be addressed in their tax reform efforts.

    We are being heard in other departments though – but unfortunately it’s resulting in a greater effort to double down on us, the cost of renouncing for one.

25. I dont believe Trump will keep any promises.

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