Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 6 of 11 (Year 2019)

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

If clicking on a link brings you to the wrong page in the comment stream, click here to get to the most recent comments.

 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.

2019.12.15
Canadians travelling to or through the US should pay attention to their withering rights, H.M. Jocelyn, CBC News, Canada.
2019.12.12
EU revives issue of FATCA information exchange as year-end deadline for banks approaches, Helen Burggraf, AmericanExpatFinance.
2019.12.10
13 Reasons Why I Committed Citizide, John Richardson, TaxConnections.
US tax filing requirements that Americans living in Canada should know, David Altro and Avi Guttman, Globe and Mail, Canada.
2019.12.07
Confirmed – Rep. Holding to leave Congress at end of 2020, after reintroducing Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad Act,  Helen Burggraf, AmericanExpatFinance.
2019.12.06
Trump is trying to make it took expensive for poor immigrants to stay, Annalisa Merrelli, Quartz, US.
2019.12.05
Revenue Neutrality And A Move To Residence-based Taxation: Open Letter To Democrats Abroad, John Richardson, Karen Alpert, Laura Snyder, TaxConnections.
What It’s Like to Retire Abroad,  Glenn Ruffenach, Wall Street Journal, US.

Earlier 2019 articles are in the  Media and Blog Articles 2019 Archive.  Links to previous years’ archives are also at that link.

2020.01.01: This thread is now closed. Please comment at Media and Blog Articles Part 7 of 7
.

523 thoughts on “Media and Blog Articles Open for Comments – Part 6 of 11 (Year 2019)”

  1. I personally think that regardless of whether the US ever signs up to CRS, the only significant change for USCs in EU Member States has to be through an ECJ ruling on EU citizens’ rights.

    There’s the Accidental Americans’ anti-FATCA case coming up in France. And there’s the Mishcon de Reya anti-CRS case coming up in the UK.

    Just have to wait and see.

  2. Pacifica, The link at the top of this page to the last page of comments takes us to part 5 rather than part 6

  4. “I.R.S. Tax Fraud Cases Plummet After Budget Cuts”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/economy/irs-tax-fraud-audit.html

    More on decreases in IRS enforcement actions, with the following comments on non-enforcement of FATCA:

    …the I.R.S. has made little use of new weapons in the fight against wealth hidden overseas. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law that was supposed to provide a crucial tool for government auditors and prosecutors. That law, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, required banks with American account holders to report information to the United States. Like W-2 forms that employers file to tell about their workers, these reports would force account holders to come clean.

    Eight years later, the program is still getting off the ground. Countries around the world have signed agreements, and more than 100,000 foreign banks have sent information
    foreign banks have sent information to the United States. But “there is no ongoing compliance impact of the FATCA at this time,” according to a report this year by the inspector general for the I.R.S.

    The report found serious problems with the millions of records collected so far. About half, for example, didn’t include identification numbers for the taxpayers, making it difficult to match the accounts with individuals. The I.R.S. hadn’t set up a process for using the records. The agency said it was working on such a system.

    Here, too, the cuts to the I.R.S.’s budget have had an impact. During the Obama administration, the I.R.S. asked Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out the program, but received nothing. Since Mr. Trump took office, the agency has stopped asking.

    Of course it seems obvious that the vast bulk of FATCA reports are going to be the details of ordinary same-country accounts held by innocent individuals in non-US countries. Completely useless for IRS purposes and likely obscuring any actual signal with the noise.

    Not only has there apparently been little attempt to make any systematic use of FATCA reports – the Regulations released recently have explicitly and significantly reduced the threat of withholding which was supposedly the big gun forcing all other countries to do what the IRS itself cannot do (i.e., enforce FATCA.)

    (Just like it can’t enforce CBT, and for the same reasons.)

    Unfortunately, the wretched banks can enforce FATCA, and, in many cases, do. The damned thing has been built into routine processing. 🙁

  5. Still no IRS ‘help’ restored for those it demands obeisance from ‘abroad’ (all non-US assistance at embassy / consulate sites cancelled years ago). “Taxpayer service, formerly offered at the foreign posts of duty, is no longer available” says the US Embassy website for Ottawa. The “International Taxpayer Service Call Center” still not toll-free. The IRS site says; “…Taxpayer service, formerly offered at the foreign posts of duty, is no longer available. ”

    And no “problem solving days” https://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/news/taxpayer-advocate-service-to-conduct-problem-solving-day-events?category=Tax%20News&taxissue=3541 for those ‘abroad’ that the US IRS claims as ‘US taxpayers’ living and paying local taxes in full outside the US. Nothing to assist those who by dint of birthplace or parentage living outside the US with no US economic relationship are claimed as ‘US taxpayers’ ‘abroad’.

    The TAS January report https://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/reports should be coming out soon. Hope it still flags at least some of the continuing ‘international’ issues.

  6. The release of the TAS annual ‘Report to Congress’ that usually comes out about now might have been delayed by the government shutdown?

  7. I’m guessing that the Taxpayers’ Advocate is not one of the US government employees whose work is classed by the US government as essential.

  11. From the DA webpage linked to anove:

    f you follow the work of Democrats Abroad advocating for tax relief for Americans abroad you know that a major milestone was reached in December 2018 with the introduction of the Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad Act, a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would enact a switch from the current U.S. system of Citizenship based taxation (CBT) to the global norm of Residency based taxation (RBT). The bill wasn’t perfect, but it does provide an excellent framework for building a proposal for enacting RBT that can be embraced by members of Congress on all sides of politics.

    This is very misleading.

    Holding’s bill clearly doesn’t propose a shift to RBT; it proposes a registration scheme for non-US-resident US citizens.

    If enacted, it might indeed make life easier for some USCs living outside the US, and could conceivably be incorporated into IGAs as a “cure” for US birthplace; but it certainly wouldn’t end eternal US-tax-residence for the US-born. On the contrary: registering would mean accepting the obligation to comply with US tax laws; which non-resident USCs don’t currently have to do (and most don’t).

  16. More foid for thpught on data creation and useage.

    “’The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism”

  18. Just read through some of the comments on the article Pacifica777 linked to. Looks like the Canadians have their own version of a US “Homelander”. Comments along the lines of ‘If you are a US citiizen you have to follow US law, so what?, and ‘I hope the duals give up Canadian citizenship too. We don’t need and tax evaders here’.

    Sad.

  21. Oddly enough, I didn’t find the CBC comments to be as bad as they’ve been in the past. Purely subjective but there seem to be fewer “damn tax evaders” comments and more “this info should not be shared” comments.

    What is perhaps worth noting is that lots of us in Canada grew up knowing dual citizens like myself who back in the day had boasted about the fact that it meant they could move to California if they wanted. So for some there’s doubtless an element of schadenfreude at play.

    Otherwise I’m curious about the numbers. Of the 600k records being sent, how many is people does that work out to, given that one generally has multiple accounts? My guess is something around 100k, so maybe 10 percent of the estimated US persons in Canada. That’s probably less than the total number of permanent residents. I suspect that most duals are simply not self-reporting; they are only screened when they open a new account with their existing bank, and even then the question is sometimes worded as “tax residence” not citizenship.

  22. I imagine that all the IRs can do with this avalanche of data is to keep it on file for future use . They aren’t even coming to work these days. They get an electronic item that Johnny Canuck has 50k in a bank account. He didn’t file a tax return. What are you going to do? They cant go through millions of records by hand So they hire a computer company to write code to sort it all out. Could take years. What a waste. Someday they may wake up. Meanwhile, in the IGA, it was supposed to be renegotiated or at least refinined every 5 years. Times up

    .

  23. i have lied to both my bank and my rrsp investment advisor about my place of birth

    i sleep very well at night

    it is none of their damn business where i was born

  24. @Heidi: re: “golden passports”. No problem. I got mine in time. I’ve boarded the Freedom Train, now I have to sit back and reach the end of the line.

    I used the Marie Kondo method and touched my US passport. It did not “spark joy”. It knows its days are numbered now. 🙂

  25. @barbara
    I see she has just moved to California. I wonder if her US visa will continue spark joy for her.

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