Some countries are threatening to leave the Euro because of austerity measures that their people won’t accept. Others want Germany to prop the Euro up or leave the zone.
What do all of you make of this mess?
Category Archives: Issues regarding US persons abroad
A Compliance Officer’s Biggest Headache – Privacy Regulation
I was reading an older article (“Getting Ahead of Privacy Risk” by Matt Kelly) in Compliance Week today and it led me to wonder what FFI’s and the IRS will do with FATCA data once our privacy laws as well as our personal data, have been breached. The article is more about how to handle issues within a corporation but it seemed some of the ideas in the summary would transfer easily to concerns we should have once this data is collected. Given IRS’ notorious lack of ability to deal with identity theft, I wonder what nightmares will appear once the process begins. The bulleted items are from the article with possible concerns underneath in italics.
- Do you have a means to know when your business is creating a new pile of data?
Will there be a time lapse between collection of the data by the FFI and the transmission of it to the IRS? Will the data “sit”, waiting to be evaluated in the inevitable backlog of files to be examined at IRS? Will hackers be able to gain access and befoul the process further? Continue reading
Jailed UBS Banker Birkenfeld awarded $104 million as IRS whistleblower
The IRS has completely restored my faith in humanity, for I see finally that there remains some honour among theives. Zero Hedge reports the details (Source, Reuters):
Jailed UBS Employee Gets $104 Million From IRS For Exposing Swiss Bank Account Holders
Zero Hedge nicely summarizes the implication of this action:
Uncle Sam wants you, dear concerned citizen, to expose all other such evil Swiss bank account holders (electoral campaign implications here being painfully obvious). You will be richly rewarded. But watch your back, dear concerned citizen, if you ever succeed in escaping into the rarefied air of having 2 nickels to rub together, and decide to save them not on US soil, for some inexplicable reason, but, say, Zurich or Geneva.
See also: Foreign Financial Institutions could recover some of their costs for implementing FATCA
Paris-area American journalist looking for renunciants and potential renunciants
This just popped up on Google: Bill Hinchberger, an American journalist living in France, is looking for people like us. You can view the details in his post on LinkedIn, even if you don’t have an account there. Update: as pointed out below by swisspinoy, the question seems to have disappeared from LinkedIn. Instead if you want further details, please refer to this post on the American Citizens Abroad Facebook page. Update 2: Now his LinkedIn post is back again.
Mr. Hinchberger’s website hasn’t been updated in a while, so I’m not sure if the email listed there is still valid, but you can contact him through his LinkedIn page, Twitter (@hinchberger), or Facebook.
How I Really Feel About Citizenship-Based Taxation
Cross-posted from the Flophouse. Probably the closest I’ve come to losing my temper over this whole business. And thank you for the comments and the encouragement you left chez moi – as always it’s wonderful to see familiar names and to read your words.
U.S. citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are waking up to the fact that their status and connections to the “Land of the Free” brings with it certain obligations. If you’ve ever read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of the great science-fiction classics by Robert Heinlein, you’ll be familiar with the acronym “TANSTAAFL” which stands for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”
IRS “Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures” and Hong Kong: Shatin Families Calumniated & Plundered
Potential high-risk SFCP participants enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of their evil unpatriotic non-payment of U.S. taxes at a wet market in Shatin, a “new town” suburb of Hong Kong about an hour away from the central business district. Photo by Enoch Lau/Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday, Roy Berg of Moodys wrote up a very helpful analysis (see also our discussion here) of the problems and uncertainties in the IRS’ new Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures, also known here as Stealing From Canadian Pensioners. His comments are aimed primarily at Canadians, but are worth reading regardless of what country you live in. Below, I riff off several points of his in order to explore how the SFCP affects U.S. Persons in Hong Kong, and the likelihood that the IRS may classify you as a “high-risk” taxpayer for activities that everyone here would consider ordinary and innocent.
The Americans in Switzerland Working Group – Report on abuses sent to Members of Congress, Obama Administration
“saddened123” has provided a link to this story. I’m posting it on her behalf.
Overseas Americans Band Together to Demand Rights – Geneva, Switzerland
Update: The report is available online on the web site of The Americans in Switzerland Working Group
Update 11:50 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A new report by several American citizen organizations outside the US is being used to give overseas citizens a voice in the upcoming presidential election. The report shows “how US Government policies and actions are negatively affecting the millions of US citizens who live abroad,” say the authors. “The report is based on a series of well-attended Town Hall Meetings, held in 2012 in five different Swiss cities, which brought together hundreds of Americans living in all parts of Switzerland.”
The group behind the report includes Democrats Abroad and Republicans Abroad as well as American Citizens Abroad (ACA), the Overseas American Academy and the Swiss branches of both the Democratic and Republican parties of the US. Personnel from the US Embassy in Bern were invited and attended each of the meetings.
“The most urgent motivation for the Town Hall Meetings was the unintended consequences and deplorable collateral damage caused to Americans living abroad by the pending implementation of the Fatca (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) legislation,” the group notes in a press release.
…
Posted by Ellen Wallace on 7 September 2012 at 10:10, genevalunch.com
Moodys LLP, Part 2: Do You Qualify for IRS’s New Streamlined Procedure to Bring US Tax Returns Current?
For those waiting for further analysis on the new IRS Instructions [Published on Friday, 07 September 2012 15:59 Written by Roy A. Berg JD, LL.M. (US Tax)]
If you are a US person residing in Canada and are one of the unfortunate few who does not have a graduate degree in US tax and who is not related to a cross-border US tax professional you may have missed filing one of the myriad of tax forms that are required every year (the failure to file of which can carry dire penalties). If this is the case, the IRS may have a new streamlined procedure just for you. The bad news is that few will likely qualify and those who do not qualify face serious consequences just for applying.
The new streamlined procedure went into effect on September 1, 2012. Click here to see the full text of the streamlined procedure. The program is designed for expats with simple returns and little or no tax due. But whether by design or defect, it threatens to entrap most of its likely applicants. For those who qualify, the new program may be a breeze. But for those who do not, and we suspect most expats will not, the streamlined procedure is a lot like a lobster pot – easy to get into, hard to live in, and harder to escape
Moodys Further Analysis: Completing the Questionnaire, or Entering the Lobster Pot.
Unfortunately the IRS has not given guidance as to which of the above-listed risk factors or combination thereof, will increase the taxpayer’s compliance risk, and therefore disqualify him from the streamlined procedure. Further, the questionnaire raises a number of extremely serious issues of which every taxpayer considering this procedure should be aware.
Biden opposes territorial taxation in convention speech – should make this an election issue!
Cross posted from RenounceUScitizenship.
The discussion of “territorial tax” begins at about the 27 minute mark.
Biden: It’s called a territorial tax, which the experts have looked at, and they acknowledge it will create 800,000 new jobs — all of them overseas, all of them.
The US Law that is Destroying the World Economy – FATCA
Government is always the single greatest threat to society & the economy. It was the greed of the Democrats that caused them to raise taxes when there was a real estate boom in the late 1980s.They reduced the amortization benefits in real estate and caused investors to bail out. That resulted in a one-way market – no bid! All sellers! They had regulated the S&Ls directing them to lend in primarily the real estate market. They caused that financial crisis, locked up some high profile owners of S&Ls and blamed their “greed” for the whole crisis they instigated.
Then they created the 1987 Crash by forming the G5 in 1985 and publicly stated they wanted the dollar down by 40%. Foreigners panicked and began to sell everything from stocks to bonds and real estate.
This time it is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). If a foreign entity (bank) had an account from an American in Switzerland, they had to report whatever that American was doing there or else all their assets would be confiscated in America. Even if an American is just a major beneficial owner.
This one act is destroying the world the economy in a single bound. Americans can no longer have an account in Switzerland or anywhere else. That even includes a safe deposit box. A rare collection of ancient coins was held by an American for decades in a safe deposit box in Switzerland. The bank gave the American 3 days to get out. The American had no choice but to call a coin dealer and auction it off.
FATCA presumes any American having an account overseas is for illegal tax purposes…
I came across this article because I was searching for an English variation of the following article, titled “The Mafia as the Crisis Winner”:
August 31, 2012
Die Mafia als Krisengewinner
Source
I found this article while looking for more recent information on”Organized crime is booming – Mafia is the largest bank in Italy”
January 11, 2012
Organisierte Kriminalität boomt
Mafia ist größte “Bank” Italiens
Source
Is FATCA promoting and strengthening the very thing that it was designed to oppose? While FATCA is working hard to push innocent US persons out of Swiss banks, the Mafia bank is booming, bringing large sums of illegal money into the legal economy.
Die Einnahmen des organisierten Verbrechens würden somit immer häufiger nicht nur in Steueroasen in der Karibik, sondern auch in Banken in London und in New York gewaschen.
Source
Translation: The income of organized crime is being increasingly washed more often in banks in London and New York as well as in the Caribbean.