Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Category Archives: Issues regarding US persons abroad

Cameron continues to push Harper to signup to FATCA

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David Cameron and Stephen Harper

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/13/g8-david-cameron-objectives

The prime minister was meeting continued resistance from his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, over critical plans to require countries to reveal the true beneficial owners of shell companies and trusts. The measure is vital to combatting money laundering, fighting tax evasion and turning tax information exchange into something meaningful.

Cameron laid on the diplomatic red carpet for Harper, giving him the rare honour of speaking to both houses of parliament, a visit to the Queen and a lengthy bilateral meeting at Downing Street. But Harper is worried about exposing private Canadian tax affairs and fears complications arising from Canada‘s federal structure.

In a crucial advance for Cameron, a US Treasury spokesman said: “We view the G8 as an important opportunity to make progress on cracking down on criminal and illicit actors who use shell companies to hide their true identities”.

The US Treasury said “Increased transparency including the availability of beneficial information to law enforcement is an essential element of the US broader effort to enhance financial transparency which also includes strengthening customer due dilligence requirements for US financial institutions with respect to beneficial ownership of legal entity account holders”.

The remarks suggest that Barack Obama is not going to support public registries of beneficial ownership, limiting access to tax authorities.

 

 

IRS Refunds 4 Billion Dollars a Year to Illegal Immigrants

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Here at Brock, we worry – well some of us do – quite a bit about the omnipotence of the IRS and the United States government when it comes to financial institutions and taxes, but should we?

In addition to the many, many corporations and uber wealthy that seem to routinely use tax law loopholes (often written into the tax code by lobbyists they employ) to pay as little tribute to the empire as possible, it seems that undocumented workers in the United States are able to do the exact same thing. And what’s more, the IRS and members of Congress know about it and haven’t done anything to stop it.

Four billion dollars have flown out of the USA’s coffers every year for past several years in the form of a child tax credit that enterprising illegals are claiming for kids who don’t live with them and sometimes aren’t even living in the United States at all.

According to the Inspector General, interviewed in the following news vid, once the IRS issues a refund check to a “taxpayer” that money is nearly impossible to recover.

Which brings me to my point. The IRS, that Americans outside the actual physical boundaries of continental America are being told by various tax compliance agencies and entities to fear more than the Grim Reaper, is seemingly powerless to stop actual fraud – for which they have actual proof – practically down the street from it. What power then do they really have over USP’s who live across international borders and are often citizens of other countries?

In a recent discussion thread on another post, Petros – again – reminded us that those who have no ties to the USA, or need to venture there, should take time and consider the long-term ramifications before back filing any type of compliance forms (before or after) when renouncing US citizenship. He pointed out that for many – duals especially – the IRS doesn’t know they exist. Why feed the USG’s info beast? What can the really do? I mean really do. Not theoretically. What is the actual damage? And what are the real odds? And if the IRS doesn’t care about 4 billion dollars being stolen from it by people they can put their hands on, what do they really care about law abiding duals who don’t owe taxes in the first place?

Yes, FATCA is … probably … coming in some form or other and hiding will do a person no good in the longer run (although truthfully, no one is truly invisible anymore thanks to technology), but allowing fear of an agency that isn’t even able to control fraud and evasion within its own borders be the driving factor behind decisions is something that might be cause for pause.

I encourage you to watch the video. It’s not new news in terms of the hysteria in the US about undocumented workers and fraud, but it puts the dilemma, at least for me, of USP’s who’ve emigrated in another context.

The point of FATCA and the offshore jihad on expats is not about money. It’s about information, and information is power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3eQZoXAU7X0

CLN = Permission to Be Hacked?

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Add this item to the list of benefits/disadvantages of U.S. citizenship?

According to the former officials, U.S. cyberspies, most from military units who’ve received specialized training, sit at consoles running sophisticated hacking software, which funnels information stolen from computers around the world into a “fusion center,” where intelligence analysts try to make sense of it all. The NSA is prohibited by law from spying on people or entities within the U.S., including noncitizens, or on U.S. citizens abroad. According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2 petabytes an hour—that’s nearly 2.1 million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text.

Emphasis added.

Source: How the U.S. Government Hacks the World / Bloomberg BusinessWeek (May 27-June 22, 2013) 36

Full article at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-23/how-the-u-dot-s-dot-government-hacks-the-world
 

Congress resumes attacks on emigrants: the Ex-PATRIOT Act is back

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In a press release on his website, Jack Reed announces that he and Chuck Schumer have moved an amendment to the immigration reform bill to make “covered expatriates” — people who give up U.S. citizenship and meet certain asset thresholds, or who have missed some of the ridiculously time-consuming piles of tax paperwork required of citizens living abroad within the past five years — into permanent exiles from the United States, in similar terms as Schumer’s failed Ex-PATRIOT Act last year.

Contrary to Reed’s mendacious claims, this amendment does not just affect people who “accumulat[e] wealth and benefit from the greatness of the United States and then renounc[e] their citizenship to avoid paying their fair share of taxes”. As even a cursory glance at Wikipedia confirms, the overwhelming majority of people who give up citizenship have lived abroad for many years and became successful thanks to the countries in which they actually live, not the United States which they made a conscious choice to leave behind.

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#AmericansAbroad living in Canada face looming #IRS tax deadline

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You may want to get over to today’s article in the Toronto Globe and Mail and add your thoughts. I would say it is one more in a long series of weak articles that seems to miss the point(s). Perhaps you can help educate.

It begins with:

The deadline for Americans living in Canada to file a tax return with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is less than a week away, but not everyone is scrambling to get their paperwork in order.

You can guess the horror that follows!

There is one comment that seems to make some sense:

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#PRISM data mining could undermine #FATCA IGA

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This post appeared on the RenounceUScitizenship blog.

Once upon a time in America – Protection of freedom from within

“Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and more assured here than in any other land on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. … I do not believe in a fate that will fall us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”

Today in  America – Freedom is CrimeThink and the citizens live in fear of FormCrime

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More Orwell: From pig to man, and from man to pig again – Which is which?

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This post appeared on the RenounceUScitizenship blog.

animalfarm 

Responding to terrorism – A wonderful article

Does the obsession with “terror” actually create terror?

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Federal income tax quietly turns 100. What! No #IRS dance parties to celebrate?

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So where is the celebration and line dancing Examiners partying over this important anniversary?

Maybe this was what that IRS line dancing video was all about.

Or were these managers who came from the same IRS Small Business Division that was responsible for administering the OVDP penalty collection, only celebrating their $5.5 Billion contribution to the general revenue that 100 years of rule making made possible!

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FATCASpeak – Double Plus Good Thought

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government…

It would have been quite impossible to render this into FATCASpeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Amtot. Various writers, such as Eric, Orwell, Just Me, Em, Badger, Calgary, Plato, Petros, Deckard, Joe Smith, SwissPinoy, Jefferson Tomas, Blaze, Outraged Canadian, Roger, Nobledreamer, Tim, Victoria, Bubblebustin, Recalcitrant,  Markpinetree, Pacifica777, usxcanada, RenounceUScitizenship and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.

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Canadians for Tax Fairness and Dennis Howlett attacks Harper for blocking G8 Tax GATCA

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Text of suggested constituent message from Canadians for Tax Fairness:

 

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

I urge you to support British Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposed global rules to prevent tax evasion at the G8 Summit.

Federal and provincial governments in Canada are losing billions of dollars in tax revenue that is needed to fund health, education and other critical public services. Poor countries in Africa are also losing ten times what they receive in aid because of illicit financial flows facilitated by tax havens.

I understand that Canada may be blocking agreement at the upcoming G8 Summit on key measures to tackle tax havens. Why would you oppose a public registry of who are the ultimate beneficial owners of companies, accounts and trusts when this would lift the veil of secrecy that protects tax evaders and criminal organizations?  Why oppose automatic tax information exchange when this could help tax authorities to go after tax cheats?

Tax havens are a huge and growing problem. Canada needs to support, not block, strong coordinated global action now to tackle tax havens.

I am also sending this message to my Member of Parliament asking that they do what they can to get Canada to be a leader, not a laggard on fighting tax evasion.

Sincerely,