Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Tag Archives: Federal Register

Q2 Federal Register expatriates list shows 460 renunciants plus relinquishers; NICS added 1,471 renunciants

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 81 Comments

The Q2 2015 Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate has been placed on public inspection for printing in the Federal Register for 31 July 2015, one day later than required by law. This is the seventy-fifth list to appear since the passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or maybe the seventy-fourth. (That depends on whether you count the 52-days-late Q3 2000 list, which was an exact duplicate of the Q2 2000 list.)

The list this quarter contains 460 names. This is the smallest quarterly total since the absurdly-small Q4 2012 list, which contained just 45 names. On the other hand, it’s also the second-fastest publication time since then too (the fastest being the Q3 2014 list, the only one to appear on time since then). During the same period covered by the newest list, the FBI’s NICS gun control database went from 28,646 renunciant records to 30,117, an increase of 1,471 renunciants — similar to the number added to NICS during the first three months of the year.

Working from the (possibly outdated, and if so probably too low rather than too high) estimate of four or five relinquishers for every six renunciants, the NICS figures suggests that at least 2,700 people gave up U.S. citizenship during those three months. On top of that, perhaps 4,500 ex-permanent residents cancelled their green cards during the same period (based on USCIS statistics from 2013).

Continue reading →

Late & unreliable Federal Register expatriates list causes political dispute in Haiti

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 45 Comments

The Federal Register published expatriates list for the first quarter of 2015 is finally out for public inspection and due to be printed tomorrow, more than a week late. The IRS approved the list for publication internally on 28 April and sent it to the Federal Register folks, but it was not actually published on time, a clear violation of 26 USC § 6039G(d). However, this is barely even news: the list has been late for nine out of the past ten quarters too. And anyway one week is far short of the record of 599 days set by the Q2 1998 list (which didn’t appear until March 2000), or more recently the Q2 2010 list, which was 103 days late. Such habitual tardiness clearly indicates that this is a willful violation of the Internal Revenue Code by IRS employees, which should be punished but certainly won’t be.

This list contains 1,336 names of certain people who renounced or relinquished U.S. citizenship and whose information the IRS received in the first three months of this year. This is a smaller number than the 1,406 records — solely of renunciants, not of relinquishers — which were added to the FBI’s NICS gun control database over the same period, bringing it from 27,240 renunciant records up to 28,646. NICS also added another 767 renunciant records in April. (Given that the Federal Register list is too small even to cover all renunciants, it is not mathematically possible that it includes ex-green card holders, and no name of an ex-green card holder has ever been confirmed present in the list.)

This late, incomplete list isn’t merely a source of mild annoyance for us here at the Isaac Brock Society — instead, for the second time in recent years, it’s causing political controversy in the Caribbean. Haitian First Lady Sophia Martelly states that she renounced U.S. citizenship in March 2014 in preparation for her own entry into electoral politics this year. Local newspapers have complained that her name hasn’t shown up in the Federal Register list. But this isn’t unusual at all: nearly every single other public figure I know of whose 2014 renunciation/relinquishment was reported in the media hasn’t shown up either.

Continue reading →

Americans at least three to five times as likely as Pakistanis to renounce citizenship

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 26 Comments

More than 3,400 Pakistanis have renounced citizenship in the past five years, which the Express Tribune describes as a “worrying sign”:

More than 3,400 Pakistani citizens have renounced their nationality in the last five years after adopting the citizenship of other countries while another 1,500 want to give up their association with the homeland. Around 251 Pakistanis have adopted the nationality of Canada, 171 of the United States, 145 of Australia, 121 of New Zealand, 75 of Norway while 54 chose to become citizens of Denmark. The rest went for the citizenship of other countries in Europe and the Middle East, immigration officials told The Express Tribune.

As the article goes on to point out, Pakistan allows dual citizenship with a variety of countries in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, meaning that those emigrants could have retained their Pakistani citizenship, but instead explicitly rejected that choice. In doing so, they voluntarily gave up a variety of benefits which the Pakistani government offers to its citizens abroad, such as evacuation from war-torn Yemen — a “benefit of citizenship” which the U.S. has not seen fit to extend to its own diaspora (contrary to all the Homelander myths about black helicopters coming to rescue us wherever on Earth we might go).

According to recent estimates, the Pakistani diaspora is about the same size as the American diaspora: each comprises seven million citizens living outside of their respective countries. But the number of Americans who have given up their citizenship in the past half-decade is at least in the low five digits.

Continue reading →

American diaspora’s population-adjusted citizenship renunciation rate worse than Kyrgyzstan’s, but possibly not as bad as Ghana’s (yet)

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 78 Comments

The latest expat honour roll has been placed on public inspection for printing in tomorrow’s Federal Register, under a brand new title with a wider variety of punctuation: “Individuals, Who Have Chosen To Expatriate; Quarterly List”. Though it claims to have been approved for publication nearly three weeks ago ago, on 18 July, it was not actually published as required by 26 USC 6039G(d), nor even placed on public inspection, until a week after the 30 July deadline, making this the eighth quarter in a row in which the list has been late.

Coincidentally, this month’s NICS report from the FBI was also delayed — they tried uploading it yesterday, slightly later than usual, but due to an issue with the Plone content management system they use for their website, all of the PDF files went missing. Fortunately, they had more success when they retried the upload this morning. The report reveals that they’ve now hit exactly 26,000 records in the “Renounced United States citizenship” category, up by 577 since last month and 2,193 since the end of last year.

NICS includes only renunciants, not relinquishers; if the previous ratio of 4 or 5 relinquishers for every six renunciants still holds true, that suggests that roughly 3,500 to 4,000 people have given up U.S citizenship in one way or another this year. In contrast, the Federal Register list — which is supposed to include renunciants, relinquishers, and even some green card holders — has just 576 names, giving us a total of 1,577 “published expatriates” so far this year — with many confirmed cases of missing names.

Meanwhile, 124 Kyrgyzstanis among a diaspora of half a million and 817 Ghanaians among a diaspora of between 1.5 and 3 million renounced their respective citizenships in all of 2013.

Continue reading →

The Federal Register: timeliness, date of filing, and date of publication

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 43 Comments

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, not later than 30 days after the close of each calendar quarter, the Secretary shall publish in the Federal Register the name of each individual losing United States citizenship (within the meaning of section 877 (a) or 877A) with respect to whom the Secretary receives information under the preceding sentence during such quarter.

Notices to be printed in the Federal Register for 30 July 2014 have just been placed on public inspection, but the Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate is not among them. This means that for the eighth quarter in a row, the list of certain expatriates will not be published in a timely fashion as required by 26 USC § 6039G(d).

Defenders of the poor beleaguered Secretary of the Treasury will claim that he already approved the list for publication, and it’s someone else’s fault that it failed to actually get published on time, and that he hasn’t broken the law. But applicable case law shows quite clearly that when a statute requires publication of a notice, mere agency approval or placement on public inspection is not enough to meet the requirement of the law.

And since the IRS is so concerned that about international reporting requirements these days, shouldn’t they be enforcing 6039G(d) just as strictly as they enforce its neighbour, 6038D?

Continue reading →

1,001 names in latest Federal Register “name-and-shame” list

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 74 Comments

The Q1 2014 Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate has been placed on public inspection for printing in the Federal Register for 2 May 2014, two days later than required by 26 USC § 6039G(d). This is the seventh quarter in a row in which the Internal Revenue Service has failed to publish their list of certain ex-Americans by the legally-mandated deadline, bringing their all-time compliance rate to a dismal 27.5%.

One famous name did appear: “Tina Turner”, in precisely that form — rather surprising, since as far as I know that’s not her civil name in the first place. However, contrary to my prediction last time, the overall rate of missing names does not seem to have come down as much as expected. We still have not seen one-quarter of the famous people known to have renounced in 2013: the names of Cuban intelligence officer René González, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines’ former U.N. Representative Camillo Gonsalves, and Pakistani politician Fauzia Kasuri are absent.

The IRS’ utter inability to publish a simple list of names in a complete and timely fashion just fills you with confidence that they’re going to be able handle all that FATCA data fairly and competently, right?

As always, congratulations to Canadian anthropologists and insurance agents, Thai schoolteachers, fresh Singaporean university graduates, and every other ordinary emigrant and accidental American whose name was included in a list which delusional politicians think covers only “a handful of the wealthiest of the wealthy”, and my sympathies to those who for whatever reason did not have their names included.

Violation of 26 USC § 6103 in latest Federal Register list

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 61 Comments

As Innocente notes, the Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate for Q4 2013 is now available for public inspection on the Federal Register website. The list has a bit more than 630 names; the usual caveat about the completeness of the list applies, especially seeing as, once again, the FBI’s count of renunciants is greater than the IRS’ count of renunciants, relinquishers, and green card abandoners combined.

Update: the FBI has also posted its latest monthly report on Active Records in the NICS Index, which showed 24,127 records in the “Renounced U.S. citizenship” category, up by 320 since the beginning of the year. That suggests the total number of renunciants and relinquishers during January was around 600. According to the Federal Denials report, NICS also caught one firearms purchase attempt last month by a renunciant or, more likely, a person fraudulently using a renunciant’s identity.

With the latest Federal Register list, fresh list author Maureen Manieri may have broken the United States of America’s tax laws in a creative new way: not just by submitting the list for publication after the 30-day deadline, but by disclosing information in violation of 26 USC § 6103, “Confidentiality and disclosure of returns and return information”: one entry in the list contains not just a name, but other information whose disclosure is illegal.

Continue reading →

Federal Register published expatriates list: late and incomplete as usual

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 76 Comments

Innocente lands the first punch again: the latest “name-and-shame list” has been placed on public inspection for printing in tomorrow’s Federal Register. You can view it here. It is, of course, nearly two weeks past the October 30th deadline for the list to be printed, but perhaps it’s because the list compiler is still getting used to her new role: Ann V. Gaudelli has moved on to bigger and better things, and the naming & shaming is now the responsibility of Dorothy A. Harbison.

Continue reading →

Orlan Calayag gave up U.S. citizenship, says official U.S. government notice from August 2013

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 6 Comments

Recently, newspapers in the Philippines have reported on accusations that National Food Authority administrator Orlan Calayag is still a U.S. citizen. For example, The Philippine Star writes that Calayag “acquired dual citizenship as American and Filipino on Jan. 7, 2013”, while the Manila Standard Today quotes an unnamed source who claims that Calayag “reacquired Philippine citizenship … but still did not renounce his US citizenship”. 

However, the people they quoted are missing a crucial fact: in August 2013, the U.S Internal Revenue Service (IRS) confirmed in an official notice that one Orlan Agbin Calayag had given up his U.S. citizenship. Calayag was one of more than a thousand people whose names appeared in the IRS’ most recent official list of newly-minted ex-U.S. citizens. Most of them seem to have given up U.S. citizenship sometime between mid-2012 and early 2013.

Whether or not Calayag is a natural-born citizen of the Philippines (a question of Philippine law on which I take no position), he is definitely no longer an American or a dual citizen.

Continue reading →

Two South Koreans who gave up green cards in 2012 not in Federal Register

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 26 Comments

Recently I ran across a story from July 2012 about two Republic of Korea Army officer candidate school graduates who gave up U.S. green cards to receive their commissions; the hometown paper ran a brief human interest story about them, which I translated below. In contrast to the Homeland image of immigrants-turned-emigrants as either “ungrateful tax cheats” or “failures who self-deport”, they’re just ordinary young men who made their own choices about where they wanted to live as adults, choices which happened to differ from those of their parents.

Both men were in their mid-twenties and almost certainly qualified as “former long-term permanent residents” for U.S. emigration control purposes, but neither had their names published in the Federal Register as required by law. We’ve previously discussed several cases of South Koreans who gave up U.S. green cards to serve in the army, but this is the first case I’ve come across after the Federal Register list began claiming (in Q1 2012) that it includes green card holders.

Of course, we already know that nearly two thousand South Koreans gave up U.S. citizenship or green cards last year and that the vast majority did not appear in the Federal Register, but it’s good to have some concrete names to demonstrate this phenomenon. As far as I can tell, the problem may be that USCIS still doesn’t provide the IRS with enough information to distinguish “long-term former permanent residents” (nearly a decade-and-a-half after GAO first complained about the issue).

Continue reading →