Media and Blog Articles – Part 1 of 11 (to 26 May 2015)

3,971 thoughts on “Media and Blog Articles – Part 1 of 11 (to 26 May 2015)”

1. calgary411 Onward legal action! Yet growing awareness and sympathy among those in the homeland will help the US legislative action. We would never get them all to agree anyway. I believe at the time of the US Declaration of Independence it was 1/3 For, 1/3 Against, and 1/3 indifferent and they still went ahead with it.

2. From: http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-print-cnt.aspx?id=20141114000102&cid=1102

   Over 4,000 Taiwan bank accounts affected by FATCA

   Taiwan’s financial authorities have found that there are 4,273 bank accounts in Taiwan whose holders are obligated to report assets to the United States tax authorities, Taiwan’s top financial regulator said Thursday.

   Tseng Ming-chung, chairperson of the Financial Supervisory Commission, said most of the account holders in Taiwan–those who meet the criteria like having been born in the US, having US phone numbers and bank accounts with more than US$50,000–have agreed to act in accordance with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

   Tseng and Ministry of Finance officials visited the US Nov. 2-5 to finalize an inter-governmental agreement (IGA) on FATCA. However, as a Chinese-language translation of the agreement is still pending, its signing has been delayed.

   In response to criticism that such an IGA is unfair to Taiwan because Taiwan would be providing information to the US without getting anything in return, Tseng said Taiwan is seeking a “mutually beneficial” agreement with the US under which exchange of information will be done in a reciprocal way.

   As to reports that some US tax payers in Taiwan might have moved some of their assets to banking institutions of farmers’ or fishermen’s associations, Tseng said he has not discovered any “substantial” flows into banking institutions that are not under FCC supervision.

   Banks or cooperatives run by farmers’ and fishermen’s associations are under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Agricultural Finance under the Council of Agriculture–which Tseng asserts “knows its duties in this regard, too.”

   Tseng also explicitly said that none of the 4,273 accounts belongs to President Ma Ying-jeou, who held a US green card that he says expired long ago….

3. @Stephen Kish: now that’s interesting. Taiwanese media estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of duals (mostly people who naturalised & then moved back to Taiwan) & green card holders in Taiwan. Even speaking very conservatively, I’d say that 50,000 (about half the number as in South Korea) is a reasonable estimate. But the banks only found four thousand accounts. I guess that means all the others didn’t have any US indicia that the banks could detect, or that when they were confronted they plain old lied about their status.

4. @Eric

   I think the answer is that they did like my extended family did… they have a gc or they naturalized… they still had homes & so forth in their home country… they never bothered to change anything… had 2 lives… & paid taxes in 2 countries & treated them separately… which was the info rec’d by my family on their taxes yrs ago to do… the ones caught in the net… they are probably elderly & have joint accounts in their home country with someone in the US…

5. Its the US place of birth that gets them, it is the mark of perpetual servitude.

6. @Steven Kish,
   I posted the link to the 4000 accounts on Nov 13th here. Different article.

7. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/retirees-risk-blowing-ira-deadline-and-paying-huge-penalties-161644425.html

   and where is the logic in this punishment for old people?

8. @Polly,
   I have mentioned the tax on RMD before. I personally think this is one of the most evil things they can do. Tax people who may have failing mental capacity and the rates are really high as well.

9. @Neill
   All of this is cruel! People don`t care anymore and it is about survival of the fittest. Old people, people who can’t vote – just get shit on.

10. @ Tom Alciere: The ” I Am Canada, Hear Me Roar Mr. President” article via Robert Wood is absolutely supurb (thanks for sharing) and should be VERY WIDELY circulated to other print and telecommunications media.
    This article says it all, and says it very well. Could this be forwarded to all members of the newly forming Congress (with attribution to Mr. Wood)? Maybe to all legislators in Canada (as an update to IBS presentations in June)? To major TV and radio news and documentary/investigative programs on CNN, PBS, FOX?
    What would be the best approach?
    1000 thank yous, I AM CANADA, whoever you are, for such honest and clear detailing of your situation, one that reflects the situations of thousands of us in Canada (and elsewhere throughout the world). Will you be sending this to Mr. President?

11. @Eric
    I thought maybe other people didn’t have a single bank account with over $50,000 in it. Maybe they diversified? Doesn’t FATCA proceed in two phases: over $50,000 and then the rest?

12. @LM:

    Here’s my secret: I go to news.google.com, news.bing.com and news.yahoo.com and do a search for FATCA, then specify sort by date (or last 24 hours) and if I see something good, I rush to the IBS website with the childish hope that somebody else didn’t beat me to it, that I get to be the first one to post it.

13. US tax rules sour life for American expats
    Some surrender citizenship

    http://www.arabtimesonline.com/NewsDetails/tabid/96/smid/414/ArticleID/192981/reftab/73/t/US-tax-rules-sour-life-for-American-expats/Default.aspx

14. @Tom Alciere, if you have (or don’t mind creating) a Google account then Google alerts might take some of the legwork out of your daily search. Of course, it might also take out some of the sense of achievement.

15. Apples and oranges?

    Living in China for 9-1/2 years with Canadian residency for tax purposes / how does this situation compare with our living in Canada (as Canadian citizens and permanent residents) for US tax purposes? http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/edwin-and-elise-britton-battle-revenue-canada-over-18k-tax-bill-1.2835478

    In a phone call to the CRA to fix an issue with the Chinese address on file, Elise Britton says the tax agency started questioning whether the family should have been receiving the Canada child tax benefit and the GST/HST rebate for those years they were in China.

    “When I spoke to the child tax benefit people, fear gripped my heart…when I started calculating that we could be owing them a whole whack of money.”

    The Brittons have nine children, some of them are grown, a few still live at home.

    “[We felt] shock, fear…because we don’t have [the money]. Anger because we really felt that we had been misled,” said the couple.

    After nine years of filing taxes, there was now a question as to whether the Brittons were residents or non-residents under Canada’s tax laws.

16. From ACA (American Citizens Abroad) October News Update
    ACA Friendly Foreign Financial Institutions Directory

    ACA is preparing a “Friendly Foreign Financial Institutions Directory” which will list banks, brokerage houses, investment advisory firms, etc. that regardless of whatever problems might exist, welcome Americans abroad as customers. We know that these exist. Their numbers vary from locale to locale, but they are there. We need you to give us the names of financial institutions where you live or elsewhere. Also, if you would like to volunteer to help on this project, please stick up your hand! Contact Charles Bruce at cmb@ilf.ch or Julie Sanford at julie.sanford@americansabroad.org. Stay tuned for more developments!

    ALSO:

    Taxation

    Allison Christians on FATCA/FBAR

    FATCA/FBAR: Law-abiding American expats are fed up with the perceived injustices related to these acronyms, but few have articulated it as effectively as Allison Christians, the H. Heward Stikeman Chair in Tax Law at McGill University in Montreal. Professor Christians has discussed, in papers and recent articles, different aspects of the unfairness of the reporting requirements inflicted on Americans living and working overseas. In one, she focuses specifically on the blatant contradictions between these filing requirements and the recently IRS-implemented “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights”, and in another she examines the undue burden of FBAR filing requirements. She proposes both interim and long-term solutions.

    FBAR e-filing: violates Taxpayer Bill of Rights, challengeable under Haar

    Allison Christians comes to the fore with two points in this article:

    1) She echoes the claim made by Eric Kroh of Tax Analysts that it is unfair to label U.S. citizens living overseas as criminals by making them register with the “Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit” (FinCEN) using an FBAR e-filing system that is riddled with frustrating error messages (with no other way to comply with the reporting requirements). She then takes this idea a step further by stating that this clearly violates the third and the tenth provisions in the recently IRS-adopted Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TBOR), specifically “The Right to Quality Service” and “The Right to a Fair and Just Tax System”.

    2) The other point she makes is that the “e-filing requirement is susceptible to legal challenge under the recent decision of the Massachusetts Appellate Tax Board (MATB) in Haar v Commr.” Here, Christians is asking whether the IRS has a right to impose relatively hefty fines on someone who has not paid electronically, arguing that FBAR-filers, like regular taxpayers, should have a choice to pay online or by check. In Haar’s favor, the MATB “found and ruled that the appellant exercised the degree of care that an ordinary taxpayer in his position would have exercised when he made his timely payment by check.”

    This raises the question whether IRS penalties for FBAR non-compliance generally are fair and reasonable, and meted out appropriately. If, as Professor Christians suggests, the TBOR is being taken seriously and at face-value, it would seem that, despite Congress’s unwillingness to codify the TBOR, we are in for more legal challenges to help protect U.S. citizens abroad while establishing reasonable boundaries for IRS enforcement.

    Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TBOR): Adopted by the IRS June 10, 2014, each and every taxpayer has a set of fundamental rights they should be aware of when dealing with the IRS. Explore your rights and the obligations of the IRS to protect them.

    The Right to Be Informed
    The Right to Quality Service
    The Right to Pay No More than the Correct Amount of Tax
    The Right to Challenge the IRS’s Position and Be Heard
    The Right to Appeal an IRS Decision in an Independent Forum
    The Right to Finality
    The Right to Privacy
    The Right to Confidentiality
    The Right to Retain Representation
    The Right to a Fair and Just Tax System

    Paperwork and Punishment: It’s Time to Fix FBAR

    In her recently published paper, Ms. Christians states that the foreign bank account report (FBAR) is “part of a regime designed to stop terrorists, money launderers, and tax evaders”. As law-abiding citizens living abroad, most of us, she argues, are unfairly burdened with expensive and time-consuming reporting responsibilities just to prove that we don’t owe anything to the IRS. It’s time, she says, to put the emphasis back on the criminals and take it off the backs of the rest of the 7 million U.S. citizens living abroad. The main points she makes are: 1) the $10,000 reporting threshold was established in 1970 and, if adjusted for inflation, should be closer to $60,000—which would eliminate reporting requirements for many overseas Americans who don’t owe any taxes anyway; 2) many violators of FBAR are simply ignorant of the filing requirements or procedures, but the exorbitant financial penalties treat them like major criminals; and 3) by housing FBAR on the “Financial Crimes Enforcement Network”, newly aware FBAR filers are greeted as suspected money launderers or terrorists and asked to “input extensive personal information, obtain an identification number that is separate and distinct from one’s taxpayer identification number (normally a Social Security number), and navigate an online-only form that is characterized by known technical issues, including incompatibility with standard computer operating systems and software programs.”

    How to fix the problem? In “The Big Picture – 2012: Could a Same-Country Exception Help Focus FATCA and FBAR?”, Allison Christians proposes that there be a same-country exception for bank accounts, where the local bank account an expat is using for day-to-day transactions is treated as just that: a local bank account, not a foreign one. She argues that by integrating FBAR into the regular 1040 tax filing, the IRS would normalize and decriminalize these reporting requirements. She has suggested this as an interim fix while we are all waiting for a more just and permanent solution in the form of residence-based taxation, a move that would greatly simplify matters and save both expats and the IRS time and money currently wasted on FBAR compliance.

17. U.S. Expats Cost of Tax Compliance | How Heavy Is Your FATCA + CBT Burden?

    http://www.federaltaxgroup.co/u-s-expats-cost-of-tax-compliance/

18. Says updated recently, yet much could be from Feb 2013, yet still relevant.

    http://www.arabtimesonline.com/NewsDetails/tabid/96/smid/414/ArticleID/192981/reftab/73/t/US-tax-rules-sour-life-for-American-expats/Default.aspx

19. @Tom Alciere –
    I note that in the article that you just forwarded there is a quote that is intriguing:

    “There are some signs that relief could be on the way.
    A Senate Finance Committee aid told AFP that chairman Baucus was preparing proposals that might affect the taxation of US citizens abroad.”
    Anyone know anything about this?

20. @Calgary411 –
    At the bottom of the article you just brought to all of us, about the Canadian family in China, there is the following:

    Submit your story ideas:
    Rosa Marchitelli
    Go Public is an investigative news segment on CBC-TV, radio and the web.
    We tell your stories and hold the powers that be accountable.
    We want to hear from people across the country with stories they want to make public.
    Submit your story ideas to Rosa Marchitelli at Go Public.
    Follow @CBCGoPublic on Twitter.

    Along with Mr. Wood offering to put more stories up on his website, might this also be a good venue to share stories such as the one recently by Canadian Cop and/or I Am Canada, hear me Roar. Now that more and more ramifications are comping out about FATCA, there do seem to be some opportunities here to inform other Canadians (and homelanders)….

21. @LM

    Unfortunately, this is not new news. After announcing tax reforms were needed back in early 2013, the Ways and Means Committee on Tax Reform received several submissions from Americans living abroad posted here (see international submissions):

    http://waysandmeans.house.gov/taxreform/workinggroups.htm

    In response they said that they were examining whether to move to a system of taxation based on residence as stated here (scroll to bottom):

    http://www.finance.senate.gov/issue/?id=0587e4b4-9f98-4a70-85b0-0033c4f14883

    It’s anyone’s guess as to whether any progress has been made.

22. Max Baucus is no longer the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He became the US Ambassador
    to China in Feb. 2014. He was one of the architects of FATCA and deserves nothing but our total scorn.

23. Thanks, LM, for this additional place to tell the stories of the implementation of FATCA IGA in Canada, which deems many second-class Canadians.

24. Well here’s something to think about …
    http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/11/16/the-money-in-your-bank-account-was-stolen-this-morning/

25. LM- Here is the Twitter Profile. I have put in bold the e-mail address we may send stories to.

    Kathy TomlinsonVerified account
    @CBCGoPublic

    National investigative news segment based in B.C. All our stories come from people who write in – gopublic@cbc.ca

    Vancouver · cbc.ca/thenational/in…

    @Calgary411 It looks like you have a feature article. In it you may put the link to the original.

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