@mopsicktaxlaw prognostications on plight of #americansabroad #FBAR #FATCA mopsicktaxlaw.blogspot.com/2012/12/offsho… – If he is right renounce US citizenship!
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) December 12, 2012
The above tweet links to a very blog post. As is usually the case, the comments are far more interesting. What follows is Mr. Mopsick’s collection of thoughts:
Here are some miscellaneous thoughts, some of which may contradict the others in response to the most recent comments posted on my blog:
1. No one at the IRS except Nina Olson is paying any attention at all to the tax plight of Americans abroad. Expect more of the same for the year ahead.
2. The IRS is scrambling as fast as its muscle bound bureaucratic hide can, to implement a very, very tough law (FATCA and FBAR enforcement) while at the same time, it looks like negative PR fallout is of no real concern right now to the people at the top of the organization.
3. Many cross border tax lawyers and accountants have little experience with IRS enforcement and are either trying to panic people because of their own greed and self-interest or by inadvertence.
4. Some people are neglecting to use common sense when approaching their imagined impending doom at the hands of the IRS. While each person’s facts are unique, If you haven’t had any connection to the IRS or U.S. source income since the 1960’s you can probably rest easy. People’s fear of government is not always rational but it makes for great discussion and debate.
5. There is no one in Washington looking out for tax justice for Canadians. If you want something to happen here you must look to your own elected Canadian officials to do the jobs your votes gave them.
6. The Canadian Civil Liberties Union is a great organization and the referenced article has reminded me to renew my ACLU membership as soon as possible.
7. I agree that a lot of Canadian Grannies are worried but its not because the IRS has armed special agents surrounding their nursing homes. There are no cases out there in which the IRS is targeting people just to prove how stupid and heavy handed they can be. If there were you are correct. I may not know about them but you would, because they would be the poster children of the anti-FATCA movement. Where are the actual cases and controversies involving IRS over reaching?
8. FATCA may be only a symptom of a much broader phenomenon: the 21st Century may mark the beginning of multiple virtual international data bases, banking being only one of them. History will tell.
I agree with him. It has been a year. There has been NO indication of an attempt by the IRS to allow U.S. persons abroad to come into compliance (without the threat of penalties).
@*geeez, the countries you mention generally require that you present evidence issued by the country whose citizenship you have renounced no longer recognizes that you are a citizen of that country. The State-Department issued CLN satisfies that requirement. Simply stating that you renounce your former citizenship(s) when you become a naturalized citizen does not satisfy that requirement.
One area which makes the US different from all the rest is that with FATCA, FBAR and US citizenship-based taxation is it has really become difficult to survive living in a foreign country unless you do renounce your US citizenship and become a citizen of the country where you live. Nationals of other countries are not normally under this same pressure to get rid of their existing citizenship just in order to survive and have a simple bank account in the foreign country where they live. No other nation treats its citizens living abroad like tax evading traitors even though, like the US, they automatically grant citizenship to the children of their citizens born abroad.
Even Germany, which requires that foreigners present evidence of having renounced their former citizenship in order to become a citizen of that country, does not require that German citizens born abroad renounce the foreign citizenship with which they are born in order to retain German citizenship. This is also true, I believe, of persons born in Germany who, under the citizenship laws of their parent’s country, are dual citizens of the country of a foreign parent.
The day is near when the only U.S. citizens permitted to leave its borders for more than a brief, exit-visa vacation will be military and diplomatic personnel, or private contractors on a short leash. Anyone else will find the barriers to emigration, foreign trade initiatives, overseas postings or free international movement in general to be virtually insurmountable.
The U.S. will take its rightful place in history beside Soviet Russia, East Germany, North Korea and their ilk in its iron-fisted imposition of border and capital controls – though even those countries never tried to impose extraterritorial taxes on those expat citizens who were either prescient or fortunate enough to escape while they still could.
We are indeed the last of a dying breed.
Perhaps someone should be the IRS whistleblower who blows the whistle on people like the King of Taiwan and other famous US citizens. Shouldn’t they be paying their fair share? The FBAR penalties on the King of Taiwan could probably run the treasury for 3 or 4 days.
bubblebustin –
The X in usxcanada is multivalent. First off, I prefer to think of US and Canada as labels of convenience that have everything to do with geographic locality and nothing to do with inevitably abusive state. The primary X-ness could be crossing the border. In psychosocial terms, there is the ongoing intermingling of two experiences. US came first and I had nothing to do with that; Canada came second and the US had everything to do with that. One more is that X means ex, as in us ex in canada. If I were more of an idealist and less of a pragmatist, seeking to minimize hassles on at least this one front, I’d opt to be stateless. At least now I’m 50% less stateful than I used to be!
@usxcanada
Thanks for the explanation, and congratulations again on being solely Canadian (I assume that you have no other nationalities). Now that you have been released from further threats of danger, it would be interesting how your perspective changes over time.
@Deckard
Ron Paul made the point that walls could also be used to keep Homelanders in.
http://renounceuscitizenship.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/ron-paul-the-border-can-be-used-to-keep-us-in-politician-or-prophet/
You must see the video in this post!
@renounceuscitizenship
Thanks for the link. Who could deny that Ron Paul was by far the smartest puppy in that sorry Republican litter?
And he is indeed a prophet – unfortunately we all know what usually happens to prophets…
@Deckard1138- I thought that John Huntsman was also a very intelligent person. He was very capable of understanding the problems with citizenship based taxation and FATCA
@recalcitrantexpat
Fair enough – I’ll concede that Jon Huntsman might have been a reasonably close second to Ron Paul. His diplomatic experience should have given him a bit of perspective about these issues that would set him apart from his far more parochial fellow clown-car passengers.
All irrelevant now – the Republicans are destined to wander in the woods without a compass for years – they’ve alienated huge swaths of the American tapestry: immigrants, people of colour, women, LGBT and, across the board, YOUTH. The party of rich balding white guys has finally painted itself into a corner it won’t emerge from for a good long time – nor does it deserve to. Jon Huntsman himself has been making the rounds saying exactly the same thing.
Ron Paul should have run as an independent – he’s too good a man to have remained aboard a GOP that is now little more than a smouldering hulk beside a Lakehurst mooring mast.