Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Category Archives: Issues regarding US persons abroad

Americans living abroad say US tax laws punishing them

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By Margaret Collins and Richard Rubin

|  Bloomberg News  April 30, 2013

WASHINGTON — The IRS reaches every corner of Charles Allard’s world.

The 48-year-old US citizen, who lives in Hong Kong and works for a financial services company, is among a group of Americans living abroad who are seizing the debate over a US tax code rewrite to push for changing a policy that taxes citizens’ income regardless of where it’s earned.

[snip …]

Allard is among more than 100 people who have written to an international working group of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging Congress to change the laws. It’s an uphill political climb, as they need to sway lawmakers with limited resources who have constituents pushing for other changes.

Current rules expose US citizens to double taxation and hefty penalties for mistakes, the letters say. Also, the system reduces competitiveness because many companies avoid US workers because of the added costs they may have to cover, some of those living abroad said in the letters.

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I guess that this is an older article from Bloomberg, but I like the new title.  Let it be heard, again!

The Economic Times reports on India’s FATCA IGA

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US eyes FATCA pact for info on Americans’ assets in India

A fairly standard, neutral review of yet another draft IGA, this time with India.  The significance here, of course, is both India’s immense population and its counteracting gravitational pull from its BRICS membership. I have already left a number of comments on the article and the field seems wide open for debate and information sharing. For those tired of the frustrating uphill climb at Huffington Post this may be a refreshing change and a chance to reach out to a very mass audience.

 

Technologist Lee Kai-fu goes public about 2011 renunciation of U.S. citizenship

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In May last year, I wrote:

Incidentally, while looking at an earlier Federal Register list I came across a name matching that of another famous tech guy — one who is well known to have started a new venture outside of the U.S. recently after a number of years living abroad … I’m reasonably sure the renunciant listed is him and not another guy by the same name: a name matching his wife’s name is listed in the same quarter, and neither name is very common. I don’t think I’ll mention his name publicly right now; it may be better just to leave him and his kids in peace.

The man in question, Lee Kai-fu, has decided to discuss his renunciation publicly for the first time, and wrote a post about it on Chinese micro-blogging site Sina Weibo over the weekend, which I’ve translated after the jump. His name appeared in the Federal Register “published expatriates” list for Q3 2011, as does someone with the same name as his wife; alongside them are the names of a number of other public figures who gave up U.S. citizenship around the same time, such as Tsinghua University School of Life Sciences dean Shi Yigong and Jamaican politicians Shahine Fakhourie Robinson and Everald Warmington. Indeed, the whole reason I noticed Lee’s name was because I was browsing the list when doing research to write Robinson’s Wikipedia article.

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Great embassy services!

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Homelanders are quick to cite the expense of maintaining U.S. embassies overseas as a “great service” provided to all us disloyal traitors living the high life abroad, and the primary reason why all of us tax evaders should shut up and quit whining about paying penalties of $13,000 in response to tax deficiencies of $21 per year.

Well, the State Department put up their 2014 budget a couple of weeks ago. As they emphasise in its introduction:

No investment matches the returns we collect on the down payment we make in our foreign policy. In fact, for just over one percent of our national budget – a single penny on the dollar – we fund our civilian foreign affairs efforts: every embassy, every consulate, and the programs and people that carry out our missions

How much of the $2.8 billion consular services portion of that budget is planned to be spent on “American Citizens Services”? Answer: $8.6 million.

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Senator Paul stirs business ire over blocking of U.S. tax treaties (Businesses eager for treaties to win Senate approval)

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Senator Paul stirs business ire over blocking of U.S. tax treaties

I had this in a comment to the FATCA thread but think more will see it as a post:

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) – Senator Rand Paul is coming under pressure from some multi-national businesses to drop his opposition to tax treaties between the United States and other nations.

Citing privacy concerns about Americans’ tax data, Paul, a Republican and libertarian, has single-handedly blocked Senate action on treaties with Hungary, Switzerland and Luxembourg that have been signed by authorities on both sides, but have been awaiting Senate review since 2011.

Read More at Reuters

GAO report reveals OVDP minnows paid penalties of as much as 129x tax owed

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On Friday, the Government Accountability Office released a new Report to Congressional Requesters on “Offshore Tax Evasion”, which warns that the “IRS Has Collected Billions of Dollars, but May be Missing Continued Evasion”. It provides more in-depth information about the characteristics of OVDP participants, and also reveals some details about the treatment of (and government attitude towards) people who make quiet disclosures.

For those U.S. Persons abroad too busy or in too good a mood to deal with the depressing drudgery of being insulted by the GAO for seventy-two pages, Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Pressreleases has helpfully regurgitated the contents of the report and all its fallacious assumptions, without bothering to commit any actual journalism such as, you know, interviewing actual “offshore” voluntary disclosure participants who have been well and truly screwed for daring to save where they live (as Amy Feldman did back in 2011), or breaking down some of the appalling statistics in the report.
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Horrible new “Tax Cheats Coming Clean” article by Associated Press via Huffington Post

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39,000 Tax Cheats Come Forward Under New IRS Programs

So here we are, back to square one again.  A new article by AP hack Stephen Ohlemacher dutifully regurgitates stock IRS tax cheat language in reference to OVDI and FATCA and how “some taxpayers try to avoid penalties through a technique the IRS calls “quiet disclosure”.  I’ve already posted a couple of comments, but it frankly feels like pissing into a Category 5 hurricane of ignorance.  I would urge fellow Brockers to get on there and help out – this one is really bad. It feels like the clock has just been turned back two years or more.

#FBAR Story Ends – Judge frees Curran after she paid willful penalty

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You may recall that this was the 79 year old woman who was coerced into paying the 50% FBAR penalty on her offshore accounts. The tweet references the post at Jack Townsend’s blog which includes:

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Cook v. Tait 8: Does citizenship-based taxation cross the boundaries of tax justice?

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This post is from the RenounceUScitizenship blog.

This is the eighth of a series of posts – starting with Cook v. Tait 1 – about citizenship-based taxation. A recent article by Allison Christians “Drawing the Boundaries of Tax Justice” is a must read. The article is notable because it considers tax policy without adopting any of the usual assumptions. In fact, the article invites you to reexamine your assumptions  about the principles of taxation. The article asks a number of questions including the obvious: who should be taxed, why, and what is the basis for taxation. Although the article is NOT specifically about citizenship- based taxation, it raises the question about its appropriateness.

An excerpt from the article that is a useful contribution to the analysis of “citizenship-based taxation” is: Continue reading →

Adminstrative notice: Login pre-screen

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This note concerns authors and editors of this blog.  Regular readers and those who only make comments may ignore this post.

Our web hosting service has put in an extra pre-screen for logging in to the blog (authors and editors).  It instructs that one must use the username and password on the pre-screen.  The user name was completely visible on my screen, but password was not:

password: web…”

I called our web hosting service and the technician informed me that the full password is:

webnames

Once you get enter the correct username and password, you will get to the regular author login for the blog and there you must use your own regular username and password.

This is  an additional security measure to prevent a botnet from accessing the login page.  They say that botnets will not read the message which is visible on screen regarding the username and password, and so this additional security feature prevents them from accessing the login page and infiltrating the website.