Stop American Extraterritorial Taxation is collating letters which people wrote to US Congressmen/women or Senators, in order to document and provide evidence of the difficulty of motivating Congressional representatives to acknowledge, understand and respond to the issues facing US citizens who live permanently outside the United States. This Book of Letters will aid SEAT in their continued efforts for legislative, regulatory and/or judicial changes to Citizenship Based Taxation.
1. Find your letters to your representatives. Please prepare them in a word file (deleting your name and address if you wish).
2. Find the response from your representative. Please delete any information that identifies you.
3. Please email both attachments to: letters at seatnow dot org
We don’t *have* any representatives. In theory, we’re supposed to retain legal ties to the last US state we resided in (or if we never resided in the USA, to DC), but in practice, a legislator’s office will ignore messages from outside their district.
I’ve contacted my reps office several times using my last address in the US. Amazing I remembered it as I was young when I moved.
Should you have never lived there, it’s recommended you use your American parent’s address.
How recent does the correspondence have to be?
@ Badger,
AFAIK, there’s no time limit on how recent. I’ll check with them to confirm.
@ Badger,
Confirming they don’t have to be recent. SEAT says, “attempts at communication going back in time are just fine and much appreciated.”
Thanks @pacifica for looking into that, I’ll look back into things I sent off in years past.
How is this going? I can’t wait to see the informed and concerned responses of US politicians to letters from abroad pleading with the US to end the madness.
I wish I could participate in this. For the moment, my domestic “situation” requires that I remain “at arm’s length” from the U.S.
Speaking of letters, here’s one I received this morning.
A few years back a lord David Alton of Liverpool expressed outrage at Eritrean attempts to tax UK residents, he called for a fully funded UK government enquiry. The government also said that anyone with evidence of coercion being used to collect Eritrea’s diaspora tax should go to the police.
I wrote to Lord Alton recently giving a detailed description of the USA’s diaspora tax, the threats and extortion being used to collect the money and deprive victims of privacy and data protection. I described in some detail how this applied to a UK born UK citizen and how she could not lead a normal, full and secure life under this regime right down to having the gains on her UK retirement vehicles confiscated by the USA. I made it VERY clear, while keeping is as short as possible that the USA is trampling UK sovereignty and is applying a regime that is many MANY times worse than anything Eritrea was doing and that the UK government should be protecting our residents and citizens, not be rounding them up and handing them over.
This is his response.
“The girl’s father should approach his Congressional Representative and ask that they raise the case with the US Government. You should also enlist your Member of Parliament and ask them to write to the US Ambassador in London.
Yours sincerely
David Alton”
Not a letter from a US congressman of course, but it just goes to show that the victims of this tyranny are absolutely on their own here.
@ MIke,
Re:
I think they’re still collecting and collating the letters. I’ll drop them an e-mail and see if they have any news to report and post a comment if they do.
Better reply would have been:
“The girl’s mother should handle her financial affairs, and when she is of age, the girl should only ever use her UK passport to open bank and investment accounts. No sensible person inflicts trouble upon themselves if they can easily avoid it.”
Alton is not going to advise anyone to break the law, even if it is American law.
Fortunately, this very real UK citizen with a US father has me advising her because she absolutely would be following the law to the letter, she’s just made that way.
I have written back asking if Alton really thinks it is acceptable for the UK government to refer a British citizen to the USA to seek relief from foreign persecution and local discrimination caused by that foreign nation, I also asked why there appears to be a double standard when it comes to Eritrea.
As I am not his constituent, he can and of course will ignore that difficult question.
Pacifica….really looking forward to reading some of these letters, I have seen a few in the past and I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.
@ Mike and All,
SEAT wrote me that they are still collecting letters for the book. If you have sent a letter to a Congressman/woman or Senator, recently or some years ago, please send a copy to SEAT.