Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Federal Register undercounts people giving up U.S. citizenship again: 1,158 published expatriates for Q1 2016

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 337 Comments

The Q1 2016 Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate, as Required by Section 6039G has been placed on public inspection for printing in Thursday’s Federal Register, five days later than required by law. By my count, it has 1,159 names (41 names per full page and 27 full pages, plus 22 names on the first page and 30 on the last page, with no entries taking up two lines this time). Let me know if you get a different count. Correction: As Andrew Mitchel and Haydon Perryman both point out, the actual count is 1,158; there’s an entry on page 7 of the the pre-publication PDF which takes up two lines.

In contrast, the number of renunciant records held by the FBI in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database increased by 1,281 during the same period, from 32,666 at last year’s end to 33,947 as of 31 March (and they added another 860 in April). The NICS renunciant figures have outstripped the Federal Register count of “published expatriates” every year since 2012, with the gap last year growing to more than a thousand — even though NICS only covers 8 USC § 1481(a)(5) renunciants while the Federal Register is supposed to include all relinquishers under any paragraph of 8 USC § 1481(a), as well as some of the estimated five to seven thousand people who file Form I-407 to abandon their green cards each quarter.

All of the people added to NICS definitely paid the US$2,350 State Department fee — twenty times that in other developed countries — which has been in effect for renunciants since September 2014, meaning that Washington D.C. collected at least US$3 million from people seeking to exercise their human right to change their nationality last quarter. The State Department claimed this obscene fee “protects” the right to change nationality — well, that’s one mighty profitable protection racket they’ve got going on there! (And it could have been even more profitable if some consulates weren’t restricting renunciation appointments to an hour a week, leading to ten-month backlogs in Dublin and Toronto.)

Media reports on individual ex-citizens

Here’s a table of nineteen people mentioned by name in media reports as having given up U.S. citizenship since the beginning of 2014; seven of their names are missing from the Federal Register (three out of eleven from 2014 and four out of six from 2015), while for two more — the ones from this year — it’s too early to say whether they’ll show up or not. I’ve also included one person who posted his own CLN on Twitter and later showed up in the list (I haven’t included people who tweeted their own CLNs but didn’t show up in the list).

Names of public figures included in this quarter’s list: South Korean pop singer Alex Kim, who renounced nearly two years ago; and Jonathan Tepper, who said in a New York Times op-ed in December 2014 that his big appointment at the U.S. consulate was scheduled for early the following year. No public figure who spoke to the media about their renunciation in 2016 has yet been included, though this quarter’s list does have one name matching that of a Hong Kong government official who took office recently: Sandra Leung Shuk-bo.

Name Occupation Other
citizenship		 Giving up US citizenship Appeared in
Federal
Register?		 Source
Reason Date
Lu Shu-hao Military Taiwan Service in Republic of China Army January 2014 or earlier No Taipei Times
Sandy Opravil Housewife Switzerland Save her mortgage February 2014 Q3 2014 Newsweek
Roger Ver Bitcoin investor St. Kitts & Nevis Libertarian political opinions February 2014 No Bloomberg
Sophia Martelly Politician Haiti Run for Senate of Haiti March 2014 Q3 2015 Haiti Press Network
Ya’aqov Ben-Yehudah Writer Israel Complicated; see source March 2014 Q2 2014 Times of Israel
Sean Cavanaugh Technology Canada FATCA April 2014 Q1 2015 Tweeted own CLN in August 2014
Mona Quartey Politician Ghana Become Deputy Finance Minister of Ghana July 2014 No Graphic News (Ghana)
Alex Kim Singer South Korea Obtain South Korean citizenship & serve in military August 2014 Q1 2016 Herald Business (South Korea)
Nicole Beaudoin Unknown Canada FATCA September 2014 Q3 2014 La Presse (Canada)
Kim Sungkyum Military South Korea Be commissioned an officer in the Republic of Korea Army December 2014 Q1 2015 Kookbang Ilbo (South Korea)
Lin Jou-min Architect Taiwan Take position in Taipei city government December 2014 Q3 2015 Central News Agency (Taiwan)
Rachel Azaria Politician Israel Members of Knesset cannot hold foreign citizenships January 2015 No Times of Israel
Jonathan Tepper Macroeconomic analyst United Kingdom FATCA & other U.S. tax reporting requirements January 2015 Q1 2016 The New York Times
David Alward Politician Canada Become Canadian consul-general in Boston April 2015 or earlier Q3 2015 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Alfred Oko Vanderpuije Politician Ghana Stand for election to Parliament August 2015 No Starr FM (Ghana)
Philip Ryu Singer South Korea Serve in South Korean army September 2015 or earlier No Money Today (South Korea)
Rachel Heller Writer Netherlands FATCA & other U.S. tax reporting requirements even when no U.S. tax is owed November 2015 No Blog (will be included in TV news programme at a later date)
Neil Llamanzares Businessman Philippines Public opinion (his wife is running for President) April 2015 No Rappler (Philippines)
Lee Chih-kung Physicist Taiwan Appointed Minister of Economic Affairs by President-elect Tsai Ing-wen May 2015 No Apple Daily (Taiwan)

Congratulations to all those who made the expat honour roll this term!

337 thoughts on “Federal Register undercounts people giving up U.S. citizenship again: 1,158 published expatriates for Q1 2016”

  2. Haydon Perryman has a great idea..
    We need to try and get someone to go to this as our representative. Could we find someone to go?

  3. @2terrified

    I passed this information on to Keith Redmond (currently in D.C.), who does not post here but is generally well known in the expat community. The cost of the conference is $1100.
    If a group or set of individuals can raise the fee, he would be glad to go on our behalf.

  4. Allison Christians at the at The National Taxpayer Advocate of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service Inaugural International Conference on Taxpayer Rights in Washington, D.C November 18-19, 2015 mentions FATCA, US extraterritorial CBT issues, compliance barriers, complexity, and the need for the US to administratively do away with the renunciation/relinquishment fee, and allow those abroad who are accidentals or unwilling US citizens to leave US status behind without a fee.
    https://taxpayerrightsconference.com/2015-conference-materials/

    See; Allison Christians; ‘Understanding the Accidental American: Tina’s Story’
    starts at 4:46 in the video – The Right to be Informed: Transparency and Tax Administration panel, https://youtu.be/7spEDgSEglQ and published in print at http://www.taxanalysts.com/www/features.nsf/Features/4B25BA71D312B2D285257F1500682E46?OpenDocument

  5. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/24/fca-warns-uk-banks-money-laundering-rules-close-accounts-excuse?CMP=share_btn_tw

    Your message is being heard. It doesn’t quite address IBS concerns head on, and yes, this is only the UK.

    Mentioned here is AML rather the FATCA. In a strange way this is good news because the FCA can’t do anything about FATCA directly, that would be HMRC.

    However, the lack of distinction between AML and FATCA serves here because the FCA can address AML and has real teeth.

    I expect to see more of this, and I welcome it. Arbitrary account closures ostensibly due to regulations could soon become a thing of the past in the UK. Or, a least this is the beginning of that journey.

  6. Victoria posted this on her FB page. It’s a global map the American Georgraphic Society made of US emigrants last year. It deserves further analysis.

    “The map below indicates percentage of the U.S. emigrants to the total counties population, and also demonstrates the total U.S. emigrants number.”

    Canada is clearly the largest recipient of US emigrants, but in typical fashion, isn’t mentioned in the comments as such:

    http://americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-week-u-s-emigrants-by-country/

  7. Funny, my Avast Antivirus refuses to let me on that page “americangeo.org” (as linked in Bubble’s comment immediately above) insisting that there’s a threat detected. Anyone else?

  8. For May 2016 FBI NICS records show 765 renunciations. For the period 1 January to 31 May 2016, a total of 2,906 renunciations were recorded by the FBI, or 581 per month. Extrapolating for full-year 2016 from the average for the first five months suggests renunciations will total about 7,000 (581 x 12 = 6,972). At $2,350 for each renunciation, this should add around $16.4 million to the State Department’s piggy-bank for the full-year.
    As always, FBI NICS records do not track US citizenship relinquishments.

  9. To recap, FBI NICS renunciations by month for 2016:
    Jan: 253
    Feb: 539
    Mar: 489
    Apr: 860
    May: 765
    Total: 2,906

  11. The FBI has moved their NICS page. New address:
    https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics/about-nics

    As mentioned previously by Innocente on another thread (can’t find it at the moment), the “Renounced U.S. citizenship category” now has 36,028 records, up from 35,572 in May (+456 during June)
    https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active_records_in_the_nics-index.pdf/view
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160721061715/https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active_records_in_the_nics-index.pdf

    Additionally, many of the annual reports do not appear to be available online anymore. I’ll see if I can dig them out of the Internet Archive

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *