2,365 names of ex-U.S. citizens in latest published expatriates list

The Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate for Q4 2016 has been placed on public inspection for printing in tomorrow’s Federal Register, ten days later than required by law. The IRS gave 2,365 names in this list, making it the largest they’ve ever published. We had a total of 5,411 published expatriates in 2016 (1,158 in Q1, 509 in Q2, and 1,379 in Q3). That’s slightly larger than the 5,321 federal additions to the “Renounced U.S. Citizenship” category in the FBI’s NICS gun control database last year. However, NICS only includes 8 USC § 1481(a)(5) renunciants, whereas the Federal Register is supposed to include relinquishers under other paragraphs of 1481(a) as well.

How many non-renunciant relinquishers are there? We’re not sure. In January, the State Department published updated Paperwork Reduction Act estimates stating that about 600 people per year file Form DS-4079, “Request for Determination of Possible Loss of United States Citizenship”. After the Foreign Affairs Manual update two years ago, DS-4079 is no longer used for renunciation cases, so that gives a lower bound on the number of 1481(1) to (4) relinquishers. The tens of thousands of people who abandon green cards each year definitely aren’t in the IRS list either, even though it misleadingly claims that “[f]or purposes of this listing, long-term residents, as defined in section 877(e)(2), are treated as if they were citizens of the United States who lost citizenship”.

The list is not only incomplete, but slow to include names; for example, Rachel Heller, who renounced all the way back in November 2015, didn’t show up until this quarter. Brockers who gave up citizenship as recently as August of last year did get their names published, but Japanese politician Kimi Onoda, who renounced in October 2016, is not included in the current list. In other words, we are not yet seeing the impact of the U.S. election results. The sudden growth in the list has some other cause.

Table of contents

1. Who are the people in this list?
2. And when did they give up citizenship?
3. Comparison with NICS
4. Table of recent relinquishments by public figures
5. Media articles about the list as a whole

Who are the people in this list?

I’m sure the media coverage of this list will continue to be largely misleading. So it’s worth repeating what I said last quarter: the people in this list are not “fleeing the country”. They left years or even decades ago. (Some didn’t even know for most of their lives that they were U.S. citizens.) Their appearance in this list means that, after having settled in another country for many years, they have taken the step of obtaining a Certificate of Loss of Nationality from the U.S. government.

Some were self-identifying Americans abroad who saw cutting off their legal ties to Washington, DC (and its coterie of self-serving revolving-door bureaucrats who pretend they don’t know that they’re ruining our lives) as the only way to survive all the damage that previous presidents and Congresses inflicted on the diaspora. They’d reached their breaking points long before anyone knew who’d even be on the ballot in November, let alone how long it would take the next administration to follow through on its promises to make things right.

Others considered themselves primarily as citizens of other countries, and saw U.S. citizenship as a barrier to their lives in the country they considered home. They didn’t have any stake in who’d be U.S. president — but instead of making it easy for these de facto non-Americans to become de jure non-Americans, the U.S. government put all sorts of unnecessary barriers in their way, turning what should have been an amicable split into a bureaucratic nightmare.

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And when did they give up citizenship?

In theory, if the State Department were reasonably prompt in forwarding Certificates of Loss of Nationality to the IRS, this list would contain the names of people who relinquished U.S. citizenship in October, November, or December of 2016. In practice, though a small number of people do show up in the list directly after the calendar quarter when they renounce, most people take at least six months to a year.

I expect that the bulk of the people named in this latest list made their final visit to a U.S. consulate well before the Homeland election night. Furthermore, it takes months just to get that final appointment (unless you have the cash & time to take an overseas renunciation vacation to Iceland or Mexico), meaning that the latest batch of published expatriates probably started their bureaucratic odyssey back in early-to-mid 2017 or even 2016.

So I seriously doubt that this list reflects any effect from the U.S. election results yet. (On the margins, a few people might have decided to cancel or delay their consular appointment at the last minute in order to wait and see if the Republicans would fulfill their big campaign promises. However, that would make the list smaller rather than bigger.) Anyway, whatever influence the election might have on people’s decisions about their U.S. citizenship, the results probably won’t start showing up until next quarter’s list at the earliest.

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Comparison with NICS

The below table lists the monthly additions to NICS for 2011–2016, compared with the quarterly lists in the Federal Register. As you’ll notice, this is the first year since 2011 that the Federal Register actually listed more ex-citizens than NICS did.

The FBI has the bad habit of uploading the new NICS report each month at the same URL as the old one; the only way to keep a verifiable collection of old reports is to save old ones in the Internet Archive each month, and unfortunately we didn’t remember to do this for all months, though we’ve had a good track record over the past year. If the month is set in upright type, the link goes to an actual Internet Archive copy of the FBI NICS report for that month. If the month is in bold type (for December), the link goes to the NICS annual operations report for the appropriate year. Finally, for months in italics, the link goes to a Brock post or comment.

Update, 9 February, 08:45 GMT: I added years 2006–2010 to the table. The earliest NICS monthly report I’ve been able to dig out of the Internet Archive is for February 2010, and I couldn’t find enough 2010 reports to give a decent picture of the monthly updates. So for years before 2011, the table only lists an annual NICS total, based on the difference between that year’s annual report and the previous one. The State Department, which provides the FBI with CLNs of renunciants to populate the “Renounced U.S. Citizenship” category, sent one large batch of CLNs in 1998 when NICS was created, but appear not to have sent any more until 2006; for example, the 2000 and 2005 annual reports both showed 12,603 “Renounced U.S. Citizenship” records.

A few caveats. The “addition” figure for April 2011 refers to all additions since December 2010. The “addition” figure for October 2012 includes what the FBI described as a “backlog” of 2,900 renunciant records, also included in the annual total for that year. I also gave an estimate of what the annual total would be without the backlog, even though some of the backlog may relate to other periods covered by the chart. Finally, the annual figures for 2015 and 2016 are smaller than the sum of the monthly additions because I subtracted out erroneous renunciant records submitted by U.S. state governments; see the Active Records in the NICS Index by State reports for 2015 and 2016.

Specifically, the government of Illinois submitted 9 records to the “Renounced U.S. Citizenship” category in 2015 or earlier, and 16 records in 2016, while North Carolina submitted one record in 2015 or earlier. These could be duplicates of records already entered by the State Department, for example if a renunciant moved back to the U.S., and the state government became aware of his citizenship status and thought they had to tell NICS. More likely, these are people who don’t meet the category definition in the first place, such as “freeman on the land” types who claim to be citizens of their state only and tried to renounce federal citizenship at the post office or by public notice in a newspaper.

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Table of recent relinquishments by public figures

A variety of updates to the table this quarter. As Andrew Mitchel notes, there’s an Alexander Boris Johnson in the list (at page 27 of the pre-print); that is probably the floppy-haired Anglo-American imperialist ex-mayor of London, who claimed in 2006 and 2015 that he was going to renounce citizenship, but doesn’t actually appear to have got around to it until sometime in early 2016.

I am no longer including ex-citizens of 2014 and earlier vintage in the table. Bitcoin businessman Roger Ver and Ghanaian finance official Mona Quartey, both of whom renounced in 2014, have not yet appeared in the list, and given the length of time that has passed it is likely they never will. In the early years of the list, some people took nearly six years to show up — like author Shere Hite, who renounced in 1995 but didn’t get her name published until the much-delayed Q2 2001 list. However, in more recent years, if your name hasn’t shown up within about 18 months, it’s likely that State & the IRS just forgot about you entirely. You can always call up the Philadelphia IRS office and remind them to print your name, the way Mike Gogulski did.

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Media articles about the list as a whole (updated 10 Feb)

A couple of good articles

Media coverage of this quarter’s list mostly focuses on Boris Johnson, to the exclusion of the thousands of other newly-minted ex-citizens. The first article I’ve seen so far discussing the list and tax problems as a whole is this one by Caroline May over at The Daily Caller; unlike other outlets, they got some real value out of their interview with Andrew Mitchel. Unfortunately, citizenship relinquishment is a complex issue, and they seem to have misunderstood a point Mitchel was trying to make and condensed a quote from him down so far that it doesn’t make any sense:

When asked if he expected the expatriation trend to continue under President Donald Trump, Mitchel responded, “I believe that President Trump is against U.S. ‘birthright’ citizenship.”

Leaving aside the question of whether Republican proposals to restrict or eliminate jus soli have any chance of passing, none of the ones I’ve seen suggest doing so retroactively, meaning that any effect on expatriations wouldn’t show up until the next generation of babies reaches adulthood. H.R. 140, the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2017, sponsored by Steve King (R-IA), a fairly representative example, restricts jus soli to the children of citizens, non-citizen nationals (i.e. American Samoans), green card holders, or members of the armed forces, but explicitly states that it “shall not be construed to affect the citizenship or nationality status of any person born before the date of the enactment of this Act.”

Robert Wood at Forbes also wrote a good article covering the major themes: FATCA, bank account issues, the $2,350 fee, and the incompleteness of the list.

And a bunch of average-to-poor ones

Adam Taylor at the Washington Post at least mentions the problems that incompatible British & American tax breaks caused for BoJo, whereas Patrick Wintour at The Guardian, Katrin Bennhold at The New York Times, and Nikita Vladimirov at The Hill don’t even get to that level of detail. To be fair, however, all their articles avoid making any inaccurate, unsupported claims about the completeness of the list. In contrast, Laura Saunders at the Wall Street Journal, who should know better, misleadingly claims (emphasis mine) that “[t]he Treasury Department list includes the names of all people who renounced U.S. citizenship or long-term permanent residence in the latest quarter“. Elizabeth Piper at Reuters echoes the inaccurate “all” and LPR claims.

We’ve been pointing out here for nearly five years that many names go missing from the list — a phenomenon which did not seem to occur during the first decade of the list’s existence, but only began cropping up around 2006. It’s also quite clear that the list doesn’t just include people from “the latest quarter”, but those who renounced more than a year ago. And the IRS’ long-standing complaint — that they couldn’t include green carders in the list or enforce the exit tax against them because immigration authorities weren’t providing the IRS with SSNs or dates of residence — has never been resolved. There’s still nowhere to write your SSN on Form I-407 even after the recent redesign, and USCIS explicitly stated last year (emphasis mine) that when you file I-407, “we will provide only your name and the filing date to the IRS”.

Political preconceptions

The first article I’ve seen which tries to draw a line between the U.S. election and the list is this one by Deidre McPhillips of U.S. News. She got a quote from Andrew Mitchel telling her the real reason why so many people are giving up U.S. citizenship — the escalation of “offshore” penalties — but instead she concludes her article by discussing things that happened in a faraway country long after the people in the list made their decisions to give up citizenship:

However, today’s list that covers the last quarter of 2016 – the time period after Donald Trump was elected president – is nearly twice as long as the list from the last quarter of 2015.

Leading up to the U.S. election, a number of high-profile individuals, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and actor Bryan Cranston said, jokingly or otherwise, that they would leave the country if Trump was elected. A number of countries, including Canada and New Zealand, also launched campaigns promoting themselves as destinations for Americans looking to leave the country after the election.

The IRS reports include the names of expatriated individuals for which the Treasury secretary has received information, which is subject to logistical delay, but the annual totals of individuals choosing to expatriate has been steadily rising since 2012.

It’s strange that she notes that the list can be “subject to logistical delay” but doesn’t see how that affects her assumption that the growth in the list was driven by the U.S. election. Trump supporters over on Reddit have mostly jumped to the same erroneous conclusion as McPhillips, as have many Drudge Report readers. Russia’s Sputnik News also ran a cartoon by Ted Rall on the same theme, though as the attached blurb notes, “the trend began in 2011, while Trump was still hosting The Apprentice.”