Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter this week to US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Director of White House Management and Budget Office Mulvaney.
Co-Leader of the Campaign to Repeal FATCA, Nigel Green, comments that:
“Mark Meadows and Rand Paul Letter to White House and Treasury Urging Executive Action to Nullify FATCA Is a ‘Landmark Moment’ and that “The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act “has only rolled on because of legally unauthorized ‘intergovernmental agreements,’” so cancelling them would “doom this terrible, toxic law.”
The full text of Mr. Green’s commentary are at PressWire and at ValueWalk.
A great step forward, though FBAR and CBT still need to be addressed as well.
Yes CBT and FBAR are to be addressed. They can be done separately and simultaneously. However, one must look at the REALITY ON THE GROUND on Capitol Hill and work within that reality. Hence why FATCA repeal is being pushed now. That does NOT mean the others are ignored. Each has its own strategic approach. These are not just words I am writing but what needs to happen and what is happening.
@All
Keith is exactly right.
Re this letter, it’s more significant than people may appreciate. Aside from fact that FATCA repeal will be reintroduced TODAY keep in mind that if the steps urged in this letter are taken, FATCA is toast. Period. If the White House issues a Statement of Administration Policy asking for inclusion of repeal in a tax bill, it stands 99.97% chance of being in there. Likewise, if the IGAs are rescinded, six years of work for Robert Stack and his pals goes down the toilet – they’ll be *praying* for FATCA to be repealed. Finally, we are talking about real and immediate relief for Americans abroad from the IRS reign of terror by asking for suspension of FATCA regs and penalties against individuals while this gets sorted out.
All of these are steps that the Administration can take *on its own*, without any Congressional action at all.
Meanwhile, we are pressing for that to happen. Remember, *none* of this happens by itself: not the bill reintroduction, the April 26 hearing, any Executive follow-through. Outsider inveighing against this or that accomplishes very little. It’s got to be done from the inside.
That doesn’t mean that a lot of other things can and should be done, like CBT/RBT. But if you set out to do everything at once you’re likely to get nothing. It’s called strategery.
@All
I would add that the Meadows-Paul assault on the IGAs is a direct result of Allison Christians’ masterful demolition of their legality https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2280508 .
If the IGAs go, it all goes.
Go people. Never had this much of a chance! IGAs would be easy to take down by the President, and then maybe CBT and FATCA itself in Congress.
What heartens me is that if FATCA falls, it is unlikely to be brought back in its current form. Even if just the IGAs are nullified.
Countries burned by the IGAs and FATCA might no longer be willing to be taken for a ride the next time around. And if future congresses and administrations wanted to try this again we’d all be primed and ready to go against it. Wahoo!
Thank you Keith and Jim.
This is great, but the naysayers are saying it’s just lip service to expats to protect the 1%. I say lip service is a lot more than we’ve ever gotten so far, so consider it historic progress! As for the 1%er’s – it matters not to me should they profit in something that brings relief to us.
Good to see some Canadian content, re Prof Christians.
@Bubblebustin
Re: “Good to see some Canadian content, re Prof Christians.”
Rest assured that the True North Strong and Free is near and dear to my heart!
I tried to warned them:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/03/03/enforce_canadian_law_not_fatca.html
But oh no, those quislings at CBA knew better. Or maybe their well-paid, self-interested, US-based compliance vendors *told* them what to think: http://repealfatca.com/2017/04/04/foreign-account-tax-compliance-act-will-cost-money-recovers-warns-ceo-devere-group-co-founder-campaign-repeal-fatca/
The sad FATCA is, if Ottawa had told US Treasury where to stick it years ago we wouldn’t be still fighting this.
Just FYI. There was a small protest today in Toronto against very high bank fees. If these young protestors only knew one of the reasons for the spike in bank fees recently, they would blow their tops!
City TV in Toronto covered the protest live on their morning show today.
@Jim
You may recall how I tried my hardest to get the CBA to lend you an ear way back then.
They claim:
Do banks in Canada support the IGA?
“We understand that the U.S. government is attempting to reduce tax evasion, but we have publicly opposed FATCA as the wrong way to go about it. However, as the U.S. government has no intention of repealing FATCA, the CBA believes that entering into the IGA was the best approach under the circumstances.”
http://www.cba.ca/fatca-and-the-canada-us-intergovernmental-agreement-iga-information-for-clients
Sadly as a result of its capitulation and eagerness to jump on the FATCA bandwagon, Canada is two years ahead of many other nations in reporting on its citizens. Where was the harm in stalling?
And if the FATCA IGA was so good for Canada, why did Conservative MP John Weston make a last-minute attempt to thwart its implementation in Canada based on the fact that other countries hadn’t signed on, or was it just pre-election lip service?
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2015/09/24/if-we-dont-ask-the-conservative-government-we-dont-get-today-one-brocker-got/
@nativeCanadian
Good point about the bank fees. I am unaware of any effort to calculate the impact of FATCA compliance costs on individual Canadians (and Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, etc etc) whose information is not reportable under FATCA but who are paying the BILLIONS in compliance costs to KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, EY, and a host of smaller fry as documented in Nigel Green’s WSJ column based on Prof. Wm. Byrnes’ research. Even if it’s just few dollars per depositor per year, it’s still a giant vacuum out of customers’ pockets. That’s not even counting how much ALL Canadians pay in taxes for CRA to act as IRS’s branch office for FATCA enforcement.
Anyone who thinks FATCA only hits duals, accidentals, expats, spouses, children, and others with a US connection is dead wrong.
The House Ways and Means Committee are the culprits who authored this monster based on the Second Chapter Of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx demanded a tax on Income in order to, in his words, Destroy the despised Middle Class. Only they can pass a bill and send it to the floor to be voted on so it will become law. You would have to outbid the ‘K”St Lobbyists with money in hand when you met with one of the leadership of that committee. They don’t call it a bribe, but if you don’t contribute to their campaign fund you can assume the position and you what they do to you when they find you in the position.
@Bubblebustin
Re “However, as the U.S. government has no intention of repealing FATCA . . .” Well, yeah, that’s the point of lobbying: to CREATE an intention where there isn’t one yet. The Canadian government certainly spent a lot of money around Washington to sell the pipeline: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/24m-ad-campaign-for-keystone-pipeline-had-little-impact-survey-1.2742079 Not that it was necessarily well done, but they were ready to commit the resources.
But on FATCA, the only resources the Cdn govt and CBA were willing to commit was to compliance and capitulation. Maybe that’s because they figured they’d make it up from consumers and taxpayers. So really, no cost to them and no need to rile Uncle Sam.
Still, I am convinced that if 2012 or 2013 Ottawa had just told Washington, No, it ain’t gonna happen, and dared Treasury to impose sanctions, the US side would have backed down. That would’ve crashed FATCA right then and there.
Shoudla woulda coulda
@All
NEWS ALERT!
Rep. Mark Meadows today reintroduced his FATCA repeal bill!
The bill number and other details will be available later today.
Awaiting news from the Senate.
@Jim
The Canadian government should have and can still say “let’s do business when you have the ability to reciprocate”.
Shoulda, coulda, will ya?
The CRA’s Competent Authority Director recently told me that they feel that the US will reciprocate on both FATCA and the OECD’s CRS. After I told her that FATCA repeal was part of the GOP platform, she added “or something”.
@Bubblebustin
Re “The CRA’s Competent Authority Director recently told me that they feel that the US will reciprocate on both FATCA and the OECD’s CRS. ” Yeah, same with an EU parliamentary delegation that agreed to meet with Keith Redmond and me and then backed out. They only wanted to talk with fellow pro-“transparency” types.
Like Brian Garst of CFP wrote, when citizens monitor what their government is doing, that’s transparency. When government monitors what citizens are doing, that’s tyranny.
Look, even if Hillary had won and the Democrats had taken the Senate, they STILL would not have gotten FATCA reciprocity and CRS. And they think they’re going to get it now by begging, whining, and nagging? Sad!
The assumption in some of these comments is that present (internal) efforts in U.S. are being aimed only at killing FATCA, and that ending citizenship-based taxation (CBT) should (?) be left for later.
However, Republicans Overseas (RO) has spearheaded what has to be done for the April 26 Congressional hearings on FATCA (as well as the U.S. FATCA-IGA-FBAR lawsuit that I am a part of) and is pushing internally with a submission for replacement of CBT with a territorial form of taxation as part of the tax reform package.
Personally, I am happy that the RO approach involves ending (hopefully with success in 2017) both FATCA and CBT.
Yesterday’s story in The Hill entitled “Americans abroad lobby for tax changes” has generated 147 comments, http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/327287-americans-abroad-lobby-for-tax-changes
The various foreign governments who were complicit in the implementation of FATCA should not be let go without ramifications themselves either. They were the ones that chose to “get into bed” with the United States in contravention of their own country’s privacy laws. They should be held to account and punished under the highest treason statutes that their country can inflict.
As for Canada, Stephen Harper should be jailed for treason and Justin Trudeau should get removed from office and be sent to the cell right beside him and every single MP that constituted both the PC and the Liberals should be kept from holding public office ever again.
But Conservative and Liberal voters are too stupid to realize that…and will willfully and blindly vote for the two parties regardless of the damage that it does to Canada’s sovereignty.
“Rest assured that the True North Strong and Free is near and dear to my heart!”
Jim, I know you’re American through and through, but there are times that I wish you were Canadian and served the British Columbia populace. That way you could get Crusty Clarke and her Liberal ilk out of office and do what’s right for British Columbians as well as telling the US government and their IRS cronies to get the hell out of BC (US expats) pockets. You’d raise holy hell in Ottawa.
@The_Animal
“Raise holy hell in Ottawa” — that’s not really allowed, eh?
This is great!
I really hope the positive momentum keeps going. So many expats are waiting with their fingers crossed, but ready to renounce if CBT and FATCA are not brought to an end.
Bob: Amen! Fingers typing away in comments section and letters to Congresscritters…and then crossed.
If FATCA and CBT are not ended this year, then hubby and I will take our own “nuclear option”: triple mortgage our home if possible and buy any citizenship we can afford. Even if it costs us a thousand times more than any US taxes we’d have owed over our remaining lives, it isn’t about the money. Anything to escape the bonds of the ugly, totalitarian nightmare that the USA has become.
Jim Jatras,
It is our experience that Ottawa is deaf to holy hell or our communications with those we thought were our elected government representatives. We affected by the IGA signed by Canada, who are Canadian citizens, are described as *US citizens who happen to abide in Canada*. Two Canadian governments, now, could have been leaders in saying *no way* rather than followers who believed that *Congress had spoken*.
Thanks for all you have continued to do on our behalf.
Hi Jim–great work, thank you for keeping up the fight.
What about this “infighting” between Trump and the Freedom Caucus (Meadows). Does that hurt our chances or is that just media hype?