In non-Anglophone countries, a lot of the coverage of FATCA is driven by cross-border tax consulting firms — the only organisations with the resources to translate huge volumes of FATCA news into the local language, and the connections to push their version of the story to local journalists on a regular basis. These companies, despite their crocodile tears, are very happy about all the new business that FATCA is going to generate for them in helping customers navigate complex new requirements, and get no benefit by promoting opposition to it.
In Anglophone countries, however, the local journalists have no excuse for not getting their FATCA coverage right anymore; there is a huge amount of material out there about the potential negative effects of the U.S.’ new fiscal imperialism. So it’s interesting to see the sharply differing coverage of FATCA in Ireland — a country with a high presence of cross-border tax sandwich-makers — and Jamaica, where such companies are far less active.
