Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 4 of 11 (Year 2017)

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-4-of-4)

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 there that aren’t on this list yet.

2017.12.28
It’s time to address the double standard about tax havens, Angela Wrights, Macleans, Canada.
The US Is Becoming the World’s New Tax Haven, The Editors, Bloomberg View, US.
2017.12.21
Rep. Dina Titus Supports Americans Abroad Tax Reform, Democrats Abroad, US. 
Now That The GOP Tax Bill Is Approved, The IRS Gets Busy, Brian Naylor, NPR, US.
2017.12.20
Taxpayers will have to wait to find out how they fare under new legislation , Renae Merle and Aaron Gregg, Denver Post (reprint from Washington Post), US.
U.S. Shareholders –Take Action by December 31, KPMG.
2017.12.18
Have You Ever Felt Sorry for the I.R.S? Now Might Be the Time, Patricia Cohen, New York Times, US.
2017.12.12
EU finance ministers issue warning to Trump over tax reforms, RTÉ, Ireland.
2017.12.11
Banque: les consequences étonnantes de l’accord FATCA, Edouard Lederer, Les Echos, France.
2017.12.10
As Australia ousts MPs with dual citizenship, Canada’s Parliament embraces many in its ranks, Kathleen Harris, Canada. (mentions MP who “assumed his U.S. citizenship was automatically rescinded because he did not meet several requirements for continued citizenship. [But when travelling to Washington] was told he was ineligible to enter the U.S. on a Canadian passport because he was a U.S. citizen. He was . . . allowed in on a one-time basis . . . it cost him $3,000 to later sort out the administrative requirements.”)
2017.12.09
The American Diaspora: Outreach and Organization, Victoria Ferauge, The Franco-American Flophouse, Japan.
2017.12.08
Foreign-owned banks to be hit by US tax rules, Financial Times, UK.
Trump Tax Plan Worries Europe, Christian Reiermann, Der Spiegel, Germany.

For articles earlier in 2017, click here.

1,720 thoughts on “Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 4 of 11 (Year 2017)”

  3. “The search for second passports and off-shore tax havens”
    Financial Times April 7 2017

    The game of global musical chairs for the rich is close to its peak…
    [..]
    The CRS is in the process of coming into force in almost every big economy except the US. Early adopters, such as EU members, are already exchanging information with each other. The second wave of adopters of the standard, which includes Switzerland and other traditional money havens, will start the implementation process next year. There are several steps in that process, but time is running out for unreported offshore money.

    Except in one country. While the US demands that foreign financial institutions cough up anything they know about Americans’ offshore assets, it does not return the favour to other governments.

    Bankers in non-US offshore centres may complain bitterly about the hypocrisy of this lack of reciprocity, but Congress has no interest in changing this policy. The effect has been to channel money out of Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco and so on into private trusts in Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota and Delaware.
    [..]
    …while more countries are reaching out for their own citizens’ offshored money, more high-tax jurisdictions are offering multiyear fiscal holidays for rich foreigners. Italy has just set up a programme for foreigners who declare it to be their tax residence. You pay €100,000 a year whatever your worldwide income.
    [..]

  6. Unforgiven Too:

    “I got it: they asked the questions in a “if yes, then” form.
    If you answered yes to the “subject to another jurisdiction” then you were asked which and if one was the US then they wanted your citizenship/SSN/TIN. However, if you answered “no” to the first one then you didn’t have to fill out the others.
    On purpose, maybe?”

    Maybe. It seems that due to CRS and other factors, a market has developed whereby high-tax countries offer the super-rich non-dom “tax-residency” under a special low-tax regime for a hefty price. A bit like the way EU “special tax zones” attract companies to relocate.

    Italy’s deal:

    The special regime allows eligible new resident taxpayer to opt for the payment of an annual flat substitute tax of €100,000 (which must be paid in one-off payment) in lieu of:

    Income tax (IRPEF) on any non-Italian source income, with the sole exception of the capital gains realized upon the disposal of qualified shareholdings2 during the first five years from the time of the transfer (i.e. from the time in which the election is made);
    0.2% tax on financial assets held abroad by Italian tax resident individuals (the so-called “IVAFE”);
    0.76% tax on immovable property held abroad by Italian tax resident individuals (the so-called “IVIE”);
    Furthermore, the application of the substitute tax exempts the taxpayer from all the reporting obligations related to the holding of assets abroad (i.e. the “RW” reporting obligations).

    The special tax regime can be extended to family members by paying an additional €25,000 substitutive tax, provided that the same requirements applicable to the electing taxpayer are met.

    The election is valid and automatically renewed every year for a maximum 15 fiscal years.

    http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=b29b6e1f-730f-4436-b885-45c714a8f92f

    But Malta is the prize, according to the Financial Times, due to being in the EU, in Schengen, and with US VWP.

    Bet these new secrecy zones were not on the agenda when the EU PANA Committee visited the US to talk about reciprocity.

  7. @Polly – everybody’s in it, not just US. It’s the usual story – whatever is done to try to part the rich from their money, a way will soon be found to reunite them, leaving only the non-rich labouring under the tax laws. Way of the world. 🙁

  8. @Iota
    But the USA is the one who poses as the ones on high moral ground! That is SO INFURIATING. ” We are the good guys who are battling tax evasion while we create tax havens within our own boarders.” Nauseating.

    As an aside- Switzerland is being put under pressure to stop inviting people and corporations in for a flat tax or lower tax. So I dont know how many countries will remain on the sidelines and not express harsh criticism for the practise.

  9. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-wall-street-speech-400k_us_5900bf16e4b0af6d718ab7b9?72&ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

    Well, here’s one guy who shouldn’t be moving abroad… It’s our friend who signed FATCA into law. A guy I voted for twice. Showing his true colors.

    To think that if we US persons abroad really were what the Democrats make us out to be, Fat Cats, then they probably wouldn’t have passed FATCA because we’d have been their friends. Because they never did that much harm to the true Fat Cats, their banker friends, wealthy donors and influencers, just like Goldman Sachs & co.

    Bye — off to vomit somewhere.

  10. @Polly – yes I agree the US and the European countries do things very differently.

    The FT article suggests the “special tax regime” era is at its peak. It will be interesting to see what new sneeze is dreamed up to keep the capital flowing.

    Capital controls were in place when I first moved to Europe. Funny to think they may soon return. Didn’t half make it difficult to plan a holiday.

  13. Of course the US has special tax regimes for immigrants. You just have to plan your move five years in advance (not hard if the whole reason you’re moving to the US is to get your kid into university, like every single Chinese EB-5 investor). You form a pre-immigration trust to hold all your income-earning assets, and once you land in the US five years later you’re only taxed on distributions, not on accumulated undistributed income. Hey look mom, remittance-basis taxation!

    The US can pretend that this is not a special tax regime for rich people because there’s no minimum asset threshold — an El Salvadoran day labourer coming on a family reunification green card can form a drop-off trust if he wants too, nothing stops him at all!

  15. RE: Elizabeth Thompson’s new article on CBC about Wednesday’s hearing in Washington.
    John Richardson is making excellent, factformative (factual and informative) comments there and here’s an exchange which caught my eye which began with a groaner of a knee-jerk retort.
    DC wrote:

    Tax evaders are cheating all of us honest taxpayers. They should all be reigned in by any means.

    Luckily there was a drop-kick reply posted to rain on DC’s reigning-in parade and deftly reined in her rhetoric.
    KK wrote:

    The “any means” part is where your opinion goes in the dustbin. If there is good reason to suspect someone of tax evasion, by which I mean EVIDENCE, then there are legal processes — including warrants — that enable further reasonable investigation and possible prosecution based on EVIDENCE. Sweeping violations of individual privacy and presumption of guilt before proving innocence, however, are hallmarks of tyranny. A lot of Canadians died in agony to prevent that. Be careful what you wish for, because there are many, many things worse than the vague possiblity of a handful of minor “tax cheats” not being caught. The longer they do it, the more evidence they create, and the chances of prosecution (and the severity of the consequences) increase exponentially. Please abandon the knee-jerk indignation, and think a bit before you advocate draconian measures in your zeal for absolute control. There is no such thing in a free and democratic society, and the “remedy” can be far worse than the problem. If you rein in a horse too harshly (not “reign”), you can do great harm to the horse and it will eventually make him mean and desperate. Reining in the ship of state for the Greatest Good is an art and a science of nuance and influence in the creation and administration of Good Laws. We have good mechanisms for catching tax evaders in Canada, but the situation discussed here is going somewhere we as Canadians definitely don’t want to be.

  17. Off-topic but perhaps of interest: Wednesday seems to have been a busy day for Mark Meadows and the Freedom Caucus:

    Congress was on track to avert a government shutdown after the White House moved to clear a final hurdle in negotiations over a spending measure to keep federal agencies running after Friday.

    A group of arch-conservatives separately breathed new life into the failed Republican effort to overhaul the healthcare law, teeing up a dramatic close to the week with a potential vote on a replacement plan running parallel to the scramble to ensure the government remains open.
    [..]

    A group of arch-conservatives separately breathed new life into the failed Republican effort to overhaul the healthcare law, teeing up a dramatic close to the week with a potential vote on a replacement plan running parallel to the scramble to ensure the government remains open.

    The tense atmosphere on Capitol Hill on Wednesday was characteristic of the unpredictability that has accompanied Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. Relations between the White House and Congress have vacillated between close coordination one moment and leaving the other in the dark the next.

    If the week began with the looming threat of a shutdown, by Wednesday the Trump administration had eased off on at least two major sticking points in the negotiations.

    The White House appeared to back off its requirement that a spending bill to fund the government include money for the construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border, and a threat by Trump to uphold payments for a critical component of the Affordable Care Act. Both had been non-starters with Democrats.

    The White House confirmed to lawmakers on Wednesday afternoon that it would continue to fund subsidy payments under the healthcare law hours after threatening to cut them off. The payments, known as cost-sharing reductions, are paid to health insurance companies to help reduce the out-of-pocket costs for certain low-income people.

    The federal government runs out of money on Friday at midnight unless Congress reaches an agreement on a spending package. Underscoring the urgency of the moment, Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, spoke with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus twice on Wednesday.
    [..]
    A senior Republican aide said that negotiations are moving apace but that it was still likely that Congress will pass a one-week funding extension to offer lawmakers “a little breathing room”.

    Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservatives who played a critical role in striking Trump’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare last month, lent its support to a new amendment forged as a compromise with moderates. The group had lobbied for a full repeal of the healthcare law, and its support for the amendment, which falls short of that goal, was seen as a major boost to the prospects of a Republican replacement plan.

    “While the revised version still does not fully repeal Obamacare, we are prepared to support it to keep our promise to the American people to lower healthcare costs,” the caucus said in a statement Wednesday. “We look forward to working with our Senate colleagues to improve the bill. Our work will continue until we fully repeal Obamacare.”

    The so-called MacArthur-Meadows amendment, named after the moderate New Jersey congressman Tom MacArthur, who helped broker the deal with House Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows, would allow states to opt out of key Obamacare provisions.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/26/house-freedom-caucus-new-republican-healthcare-proposal

  19. @ Patricia Moon
    As far as I recall, the FOIA documents were the only ones going into the U.K. government’s position. This is not surprising. British tend not to like to air diplomatic grievances publicly, especially towards a country with whom they believe they have THE special relationship. As I recall, it was the French newspapers that reported the considerable European anger towards the U.S. over FATCA.

    @Watcher
    In my experience, major U.K. financial institutions are not using the 1933 Securities Acts’ definition of US persons. They are all going with the FATCA version, although I did see a more minor player using the 1933 Securities Act definition. I haven’t heard about people being denied bank accounts on the basis of U.S.-personhood, but I have heard about people being kicked out by mutual fund companies.

    What I was told in a wealth-management talk I snuck into a few years ago was that U.S. citizens living in the UK still had to buy U.S. tax-compliant investments even in SIPPs. Of course, the wealth-management company was more that happy to help the super-rich find these products, for a fee. As far as I can tell, alot of us with less money need to rely on the reporting fund spreadsheet on the HMRC website and rooting around websites, such as Hargreaves and Lansdown, which lists U.S. domiciled funds and ETFs (and I can’t imagine who else is buying these besides U.S. persons, given the complications of having to reclaim a witholding tax). Many people just don’t invest at all.

    Where SIPPs allow greater flexibility is in the much more generous U.K. tax treatment towards funds that do not have what is called reporting status in the U.K. Normally HMRC taxes the gains on anything that doesn’t have reporting status as income rather than capital gains, which makes some sense, unlike PFIC rules. In SIPPs, income from non-reporting funds is taxed as capital gains.

    Personally, I object to being pushed into taking out financial products as a U.S. tax person for which I have minimal legal protections as a non-U.S. resident person under U.S. security rules.

  20. RE: strategy
    it just dawned on me that I’ve become part of what could be called a Disqus Uptick Squad (DUS). It’s not about individually collecting upticks, it’s about collectively pushing informed comments above uninformed comments on the “Sort by Best” setting. You see, a lot of readers will not scroll past the first page of comments after reading an article so it’s a good strategy to push the door-slammers, knee-jerkers, compliance-backers, etc, to the bottom of the list whenever possible. I’ll continue to uptick along with DoubleTaxed, PastBeyond60, swk, HardPressed, BarbiQPork and any others who have glomed onto this upticking thing too. It’s something that I can do even when I can’t think up a good comment myself. Uptick and surgite!

  21. @Embee, the comment from Elizabeth Thompson’s latest on the FATCA hearing (
    ‘Deal that sends Canadian bank records to IRS is ‘illegal,’ lawyer tells U.S. committee
    Witnesses call for repeal of Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act’ CBC News Posted: Apr 27, 2017 5:00 AM ET ) is this from our very own Lebouthillier (as we know from her previous comments, a huge champion of Canadian citizen, resident and taxpayer rights http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/taxes-cra-irs-banking-1.4028793 https://openparliament.ca/search/?q=fatca%20lebouthillier ).

    Lebouthillier and the Trudeau regime doesn’t care what the US hearing uncovered. She’s going to continue to defend the CRA’s abuse of Canadian taxpayers using the excuse of the FATCA IGA, no matter what the outcome, the fallout, the ‘unintended’ consequences for innocent fellow Canadians whose only connection to the US is birthplace or parentage or an expired greencard;
    “…….Chloe Luciani-Girouard, spokesperson for Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier, said the Canada Revenue Agency intends to respect the intergovernmental agreement and continue to ship bank record information from Canadian banks to the IRS.

    The CRA is required to administer all of Canada’s tax agreements, including the Canada-U.S. Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA), in good faith. In so doing, the CRA is supporting our government’s tax co-operation efforts, and ensuring that Canada continues to be viewed as a reliable treaty partner…….””
    Chloe Luciani-Girouard, spokesperson for Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier, said the Canada Revenue Agency intends to respect the intergovernmental agreement and continue to ship bank record information from Canadian banks to the IRS.

    “The CRA is required to administer all of Canada’s tax agreements, including the Canada-U.S. Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA), in good faith. In so doing, the CRA is supporting our government’s tax co-operation efforts, and ensuring that Canada continues to be viewed as a reliable treaty partner.”

    The CRA – Canadian branch plant of the US Treasury.

  23. @badger

    That woman is a snake. Remember her comments made to the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics concerning FATCA?

    The lie:

    “Mr. Matt Jeneroux:
        
    I’m good. I can keep going.
        I do believe that these are important questions that we’re asking on behalf of Canadians, on behalf of our constituents. I just want to make sure that we’re putting on the record that previously a number of members of your caucus—and there are a few others that I won’t go into now—and the Prime Minister were earlier not supportive of this legislation. Now what you’re indicating is that because you’ve had more time to review it, you, the Prime Minister, and members of your caucus are now supportive of this legislation.
        Is that a correct synopsis of your statements?

    Hon. Diane Lebouthillier:
        That is true, but I must repeat that the difficulty was much more related to the process. If the process had involved all parliamentarians, we would probably not be here today discussing FATCA.”

    The accusation that anyone who’d question the merits of FATCA would be in support of tax evasion:

    “Hon. Diane Lebouthillier:
        The NDP is loudly clamouring for measures to fight tax evasion and tax avoidance. However, the automatic exchange of information such as we have with the United States allows us to cross-reference information.

    Mr. Alexandre Boulerice:
        This is about tax avoidance for the Americans, Madam Minister.

    Hon. Diane Lebouthillier:
        We can also identify inconsistencies in tax avoidance and tax evasion internationally.
        Are you telling me that you are against measures that allow us to fight more effectively against tax evasion?”

    http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&DocId=8188113

  24. Well at least Maloney’s not trying to amend the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA).

    Now that she’s about to get outplayed by the Republicans, she’s finally doing something. What took her so long?

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