Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship: Discussion thread (Ask your questions) Part Two
Ask your questions about Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship and Certificates of Loss of Nationality.
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NB: This discussion is a continuation of an older discussion that became too large for our software to handle well. See Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship: Discussion thread (Ask your questions) Part One
The world’s banks are forced to inoculate themselves against the diseases that US persons carry.
USP abroad=PARIAH!
To America’s enemies this must be absolutely hilarious!
@Em
When it comes to closing the accounts of US persons, as I’ve mentioned before, I believe that former chess champion Bobby Fischer was an early test case. When they want to start denying people’s rights, they always start with people who are deeply unsympathetic and then only gradually move to abusing more honest people. In Fischer’s case, he was in his younger days a highly respected chess champion. But in his later days, he had evolved into a man with profoundly offensive anti-Semitic and anti-American views, as well as being an admitted tax cheat with a fairly large (about $3M) Swiss bank account.
So they started–IMHO–with Fischer rather than the more honest dual citizens living abroad.
So anyways–with Fischer what they did was, shortly after he moved to Iceland to avoid deportation to the US, his Swiss bank UBS gave him notice that they were closing his account as of a certain date, and asked Fischer to give them instructions for wiring his money elsewhere. Fischer actually did have an Icelandic bank account, but presumably felt his money would be safer from the US taxman in Iceland, and so didn’t want his money wired. Thus he refused to provide wire transfer information to UBS.
When the deadline arrived, UBS had a record of his Icelandic bank account anyways (presumably from earlier smaller transfers) and attempted to wire the money anyways. Fischer directed his Icelandic bank to refuse the incoming wire transfer. Both the Icelandic bank and UBS were obligated to honour this request, so the funds were send back to Switzerland.
Although UBS was thereby obligated to keep the money in Fischer’s account against their wishes indefinitely, the account was frozen and converted into a simple interest bearing account–meaning no deposits, no withdrawals, and no investments. In other words, the account became useless to Fischer until he co-operated.
Fischer died a few years later. I don’t know whether he co-operated and moved the money eventually during the last years of his life. After his death, the IRS and his wife were fighting in the Icelandic courts over his estate–and it appears his wife may have prevailed.
@ Dash1729
OMG! Thanks for providing the Fischer story. I hope those tactics will NOT work when the IRS is facing millions of recalcitrant minnows instead of one big whale … but we shall see. BTW, Iceland has managed to stare down the worldwide banking cartel and get its economy on a good track again but I don’t know what it will do about the FATCA monster. Funny how it works. FATCA is the enforcer for CBT and an IGA is the enforcer for FATCA. We’ve got too much enforcing and too little empathizing going on.
@all,
I’m thinking to renounce my U S citizenship at the Montreal consulate and
am a bit confused about how to proceed with the booking process. I tried
their online appointment booking tool and it brought up a screen asking me
for country of citizenship, country of birth, and passport number among
other things. My confusion is about what to enter for the country of
citizenship and the passport info. I am Canadian but have US citizenship
by reason of my parent registering my birth abroad and I also have an SSN.
I have only a Canadian passport. Since I’m booking an appointment to
renounce U S citizenship, do I enter US for the citizenship part or Canada?
Do I enter the Canadian passport number or leave it blank? I just wonder
if I enter the citizenship as Canada will I wind up in the wrong line at the
consulate or if I enter U S citizenship and a Canadian passport number
will they give me trouble to enter the consulate in the first place. Does
anybody else here know??? I couldn’t find much info in the Consulate
Guide on this site about the Montreal consulate. Not sure if anyone else
at another consulate used the online booking tool to book an appointment
and had to enter the above type of info as a dual citizen.
I renounced at Montreal in March, 2012
schedule your appointment, fill the information as best you can. the staff will contact you if more info is needed.
download and fill the forms (DS-4079 and so forth) you will need to present to the consular officials
review the questions carefully and be prepared to defend some of your answers. They are not out to trip you up
the staff I met were polite, professional and understandable. One was also dual US-Canadian.
some of my comments were made using Rivka88, another commentator Greenwood also renounced in Montreal
Further to some concerns expressed above that somehow the Government of Canada has a data file with everyone’s birth place and date on it.
First off, Canadian birth certificates are not issued by the Government of Canada. They are a provincial responsibility. No way is our federal government, or the US government, ever going to get access to the birth certificates of ten provinces and three territories without going through the mother of all constitutional and court battles, and almost certainly losing.
Citizenship records have your date and place of birth, but those records only exist for naturalized Canadians. ALL naturalized Canadians. Those data are protected under law from any such massive search. If the Privacy Commissioner ever got wind of it, there would be hell to pay. If the government signed an agreement to allow for that search, I would expect a whole lot of naturalized Canadians from all sorts of streets would be screaming. This current government, Jason Kenny in particular, is proud of the inroads the Tories have made into immigrant communities in recent elections, at the expense of the Liberals. I seriously doubt this government would even remotely consider something like that kind of invasion into citizenship records. No matter what wet dreams the morons in Washington might have.
The only Government of Canada database that has information on birth places of all residents that I’m aware of (and as a professional social scientist in the fed for several decades, now retired, I do in fact know rather a lot about this) is the short-form Census. Which is collected once every ten years and hence has some gaps depending on when you do a search. Which is also protected from data searches by ANY federal department except Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act, which has severe penalties for release or even viewing of individual information from that data base to ANYONE outside Statistics Canada, including Canada Revenue Agency. Any attempt by a government to repeal or amend that Act requires Parliamentary approval and would create the mother of all shit storms in the House of Commons. It also would predictably result in thousands upon thousands of Canadians flat-out refusing to return the census forms next time around, challenging the government to go ahead and try to prosecute them from refusing to fill out the form. (The law says you have to fill it out, but almost no one has ever been charged, never mind successfully prosecuted, for violating that law, and StatCan and Justice are reluctant to go down that road because they are not at all sure a court would uphold it.) If people refuse to fill out the forms because the data privacy have been violated and that is known, the census is useless from that day forward and may as well be abandoned. Not gonna happen.
In my considered and professional opinion, at least as of when I retired from the government a few years ago, there is no way in hell the government of Canada has access to a data base containing all our birth places for all Canadians, or any selected sample of them, that it could possibly share with the US under any conceivable political or legal situations I can imagine.
If you want to worry about something, find something else to worry about. Or take a Valium. Please.
@Schubert re: “I seriously doubt this government would even remotely consider something like that kind of invasion into citizenship records. No matter what wet dreams the morons in Washington might have.”
I just spit my coffee all over my computer screen. LOL!
Oops, I forgot one data base that does have some birth places on it, but I forgot it because I’ve never heard of anyone ever getting access to it for any data-search purposes.
Passport Canada may have a data base with all the passport records on it; passports do have birth places and dates (or, at least most do, and certainly the passport application files have that information; you can request your birth place — but not date — be left off page two of your passport, but that isn’t recommended because you’ll end up in secondary screening whenever you try to enter the US and about 15 other countries on that passport). But not everyone in Canada has a passport, and searches of that data base are severely restricted in law, could be challenged by the Privacy Commissioner, and also would trigger a shit storm if it happened. Also it is unnecessary; the US border people, as we all know, require passports for air entry into the US and could at any time do the same at land crossings (you still have the option of crossing on an enhanced driver’s license, if you live in a province that issues those). If the US wants to catch US-born people and query their tax status on the basis of passport information, they can already do that now at the border, but so far haven’t, as has been discussed at length elsewhere on this website and at Sandbox.
Don’t worry about your passport file being searched by our government under an IGA. That’s about as likely as the census files being searched, IMO.
For now, I wouldn’t worry about border crossing on the passport; if in doubt, go to the Sandbox site and read the thread on that subject I started about a year ago, and keep checking for any status changes that people might report. So far, this is a non-issue. Not to say it might not be later, but I think you all have figured that out already.
This is Canadian passports I’m describing. If you have a US passport, it’s your only passport, it’s expiring, and you’re not tax-compliant in US eyes, God help you … we can’t.
Schubert. You are a breath of fresh air. ‘Logical thinking ‘ indeed.
@schubert1975
“Citizenship records have your date and place of birth, but those records only exist for naturalized Canadians.”
Actually there IS another group of Canadian citizens who are required to register their place of birth with the federal government: Canadian citizens born abroad to Canadian parents. In my case I was born outside Canada (outside North America, actually) to Canadian parents who have lived their entire lives in Canada except for a period of a little over a year around when I was born. As such I am a natural born Canadian citizen, not a naturalized Canadian citizen. My parents were issued a “certificate of registration of birth abroad” on my behalf, but I had to replace this document with a “Canadian citizenship certificate” (providing the federal government with a new opportunity to update their databases) in 2002.
Those of us born outside Canada to Canadian parents are natural born citizens, and yet we are actually second class citizens as compared to other natural born citizens–and even naturalized citizens–in one important respect. We have lost the right to pass Canadian citizenship along to any children born abroad regardless of how long we may have previously lived in Canada. Thus an immigrant can come to Canada for the minimum 3 years, become a citizen, and leave never to return again–and all their future children will always be Canadian citizens. Whereas someone like myself lived in Canada for 22 years–4 years as a financially self supporting adult, long enough that I could have naturalized had I been an immigrant–yet I’m not eligible to pass on Canadian citizenship to the next generation.
This rule has resulted in some children born abroad to Canadians almost being stateless–although I believe there is an exception in the law if someone would otherwise be stateless as a result of this law.
But anyways from a FATCA perspective–if someone were born in the USA to Canadian parents, even if they or the mother were only in the US briefly for the purpose of giving birth, the Canadian FEDERAL databases would absolutely have a record of their US place of birth.
@schubert1975
Also it looks to me like the Harper government has excused themselves from having to abide by these privacy requirements when it comes to elderly Canadians.
If you go to the following Canadian government website:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/immigration-1925/001012-100.01-e.php
and enter my grandmother’s name, it will tell you her background including the identity of the European country where she was born. Now my grandmother is now deceased. However this information was available back to the public on this website back in 2006 when my grandmother was still living. 97 years old but definitely still living–so it seems that after a certain age the government doesn’t take this requirement to keep immigration records private so seriously.
Now this particular website only covers immigration up to 1935, so the youngest people listed publicly on this site would be nearly 80 years old. So maybe the age threshold where privacy is no longer respected is nearly 80. And maybe many 80 year olds would have reached a place in life where they no longer care. But maybe some do care. And maybe the age threshold is gradually lowered over the years to the point where younger and younger naturalized Canadians have their immigration records, including place of birth, revealed to the public.
Doesn’t inspire confidence to say the least.
@schubert1975
Plus a deceased 80 year old with a publicly available US place of birth might well have a child born in Canada who is very much in the prime of life–and who could be labelled a US person based on the public database.
@schubert1975
Or the 80 year old might care very much because they have lived in Canada most of their lives after their US birth and has substantial assets they want to pass on to their Canadian born and bred children. The 80 year old’s time finally comes, the IRS sees a US place of birth mentioned in the obituary, verifies it on this public website, and swoops in demanding the deceased entire estate plus at least 20% of the children’s assets.
Dash1729. You’re kidding right? The IRS has nothing better to do? ‘They swoop in and demand the deceased’s entire estate plus….’ As Schubert said you need to find something serious to worry about.
My soon to be Canadian, renounced American, husband and I hope to ultimately go back to being “normal” by having all of our accounts jointly held, despite the fact that I will always be in limbo regarding the so-called “US tax obligation”. My husband will be free and clear — we hope. But since we do not know what lies ahead with US tax overreach (even after death?) our plan is to spend to the end so that when we’re both gone there isn’t a drop left for the IRS to try to claim. Now considering the cost of senior care (my husband’s mother was paying nearly $3K per month before she passed away) it shouldn’t be too difficult to die a pauper.
@Em, I think that I read somewhere that it is probably best to resume normal life after things get settled down 3 years after renouncing. The idea is maybe that things would be less complicated if the IRS wanted to do an audit.
@KalC No I am NOT kidding. I don’t think the concerns that I’ve mentioned are an immediate threat. But they do represent what is coming next (a few years from now) if the immediate threats aren’t dealt with firmly.
Further to the issue of the Government of Canada somehow trolling their data bases on behalf of the US government for FATCA purposes:
There is one (and only one) data base I neglected to mention, because absolutely NO ONE in any other federal department, besides the department that administers that database, has or ever has had (so far as I know) access to the original records. There would have to be special legislation to permit the use I’m about to describe, it would have to be passed by Parliament, and you can bet the Privacy Commissioner would have a lot to say if the government tried (as would opposition parties and many elements in the Press, also a lot of Tory back-benchers and supporters I suspect).
To have a financial account in Canada, you have to have a Social Insurance Number. That number is used, among other things, for tax-reporting purposes to CRA. Your original application contains, among other things, your place of birth, as well as the names (but NOT the places of birth or nationalities) of your parents. The Social Insurance Number you have (but NOT the information on the application form) is available to CRA, financial institutions, and various other government departments and agencies. However it would be unprecedented and almost certainly illegal under existing privacy legislation for any part of the government to conduct a computer search of that database (assuming all the application-form data actually have been digitally encoded, which I’m not entirely sure is true now and is very unlikely to be true for SINs issued before the late 1980s or so) to identify individuals with certain characteristics (e.g., US birthplace). It would still be a massive, expensive and problematic (technically, legally, and politically) exercise then to try to match those selected records with all related financial accounts. It would definitely require special legislation to be even remotely legal.
I can’t imagine the current Conservative government and party, which among other things says it believes in keeping government small and avoiding “big government,” ever proposing legislation to permit something like that, no matter how much the more totalitarian-inclined Democrats in Congress and the Obama Administration might try to twist their arms to do so. This is not something to worry about IMO, though it might perhaps be something to be vigilant about if/when an IGA is announced, and also thereafter while examining any further omnibus budgets or other omnibus legislation by this government. But I can’t believe this (or any other conceivable) government would hand such a massive smoking gun, privacy- and big-government-invasiveness-wise, to its critics, ever, never mind in the run-up to an election.
There is no feasible way any of the other data bases I’ve mentioned, or others have mentioned in this thread, could be linked to financial records of individuals. There is no way to link your census record (assuming you actually reported your “national origin” truthfully on your census return; these returns aren’t, and can’t, be audited or verified anyway) to your bank account. Nor citizenship or overseas-birth-registration records, never mind birth certificates. Nor passport records.
Again, none of this is something to lose sleep over IMO. If you do, see a medical doctor, please.
@ Swiss Pinoy
Good advice but it’s sad that “normal” gets delayed by audit liability, no matter how unlikely that might be. Oh well, I’ve managed to hang in there since FATCA awareness hit me in early 2012 so I guess I can hang in there until 2016. Nothing eats your guts out like uncertainty though.
Old King SOL was a nasty old soul
And a nasty old soul was he …
About banks’ possible reactions to US account-holders:
Several signers of the anti-fatca petition at
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-fatca?source=s.em.cp&r_by=8750191 report that they can no longer access their bank accounts except by going into their local branch in person. It was absolutely forbidden for them to have any other contact with their bank – no phone, no online, no transfers, no debit card, etc. (I think this took place in France, if I remember rightly.)
The restrictions produced huge problems for part-time residents needing to pay routine bills on their local properties.
Also a plea:
The above anti-fatca petition has gotten some remarkable input, but it still needs more signatures before it can become effective. Many Brockers will already have signed, but more are desperately needed if their effort so far is not to be wasted …. Could you sign?
@ Sad-in-the-UK
A lot of us have already signed. However, the comments on that petition are a treasure trove of examples of how badly FATCA is affecting people (also the Ways & Means submissions). Maybe you could slip that into the Media Opportunity thread. Some of those comments are pretty alarming aren’t they.
I think this might be the comment Sad-in-the-UK was referring to …
“My husband is Belgian but has US permanent resident status, and I am a dual national. We have a modest vacation apartment in Belgium where we stay when visiting relatives and a very small checking account used to pay the mortgage and also living expenses when we go there on vacation. Our bank in Belgium has informed us that because of FATCA we can no longer communicate with them nor they with us starting July 1. The only transactions allowable will be in person at the counter of the bank in Belgium. We could lose our apartment because of this, as some payments can be scheduled, but others cannot. We pay all of our taxes, both in Belgium and in the US, and this is ridiculous! We cannot afford to fly to Belgium monthly to pay bills! The US has now become the finanacial bully of th world.”
@ Em:
Great idea! I’ll do that.
Thanks all for your interesting and helpful comments. I am back with additional questions and I feel as though I am not my usual clever self as I am having a very hard time sorting out how to even book an appointment with a US consulate in order to renounce! I have looked around this site but am getting side tracked in the many interesting comments.
I went to the Vancouver consulate site and chose “other notarial services” from their appointment list. I then looked at the calendar but either that doesn’t work with an iPad or there are no appointments available or booked for the foreseeable future. I can go to Calgary and note that their site points out that the “other” category of appointments is not to be used for renouncing and to e-mail them specifically for that. Has anyone done this recently at Calgary? Is there any chance of getting an appointment in Vancouver? If I e-mail Calgary, will they schedule an appointment?
Why does it seem so difficult to renounce? Sorry for all the questions – if these are answered in one place, I would appreciate a link to that.