Both governments are stressing that all the initiatives in the plan were developed under two principles.
1. That each nation has the right to act independent of the other in accordance with their own laws and interests.
Which nation do we, dual citizens, fall under in our crossings?
2. That both countries will endeavour to promote human rights, privacy, the rule of law and civil liberties.
Al-Wasat News, Bahrain’s first independent newspaper, reports on a FATCA seminar held by Deloitte in Jordan. Unfortunately I don’t think we have any Arabic speakers among our readers or commenters who could read the original Arabic article, but you can always try to puzzle your way through Google Translate’s English rendering of it. Deloitte also has an English-language press release about a FATCA seminar they held in Jordan early last month, which may be referring to the same event. Continue reading
A new working paper tax proposal is now posted at the American Citizens Abroad (ACA) website with the recommendation for fundmental reform of the US tax law affecting Americans resident abroad.
ACA will be sending this document to members of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee, and urges all Americans overseas to contact by phone the tax staffer of their Representative and Senators in D.C. to inform them of this proposal and to encourage them to consider supporting legislation to move forward with this concept.
Please distribute this information as widely as you can in the US Expat community.
Check out this Reuters story by David Cay Johnston: More Than 100 Million Unnecessary Tax Returns Filed Each Year. Highlights follow —
On March 28, the U.S. Justice Department sought to close a nationwide chain of income tax preparation shops it accuses of fraud.
Individual income tax returns … for most people are make-work that creates a drag on the economy, provide tidy revenues for Intuit, the maker of TurboTax software, H&R Block and other legitimate corporations that profit from preparing tax returns.
Riling up voters against the Internal Revenue Service attracts votes and campaign donations.
The average time for each criminal tax prosecution the Justice Department completed last year was 740 days, more than double the 345 days in 1992. Last year, the Justice Department completed only 3,656 criminal cases in which tax was the main charge.
Canada, with a ninth of the U.S. population, listed all 204 tax convictions last year at the Canada Revenue Agency’s website.
Thanks to Congress and the IRS, ordinary taxpayers who migrate from one country to another face incomprehensible tax reporting and payment obligations, involving a burden of time and accountants’ fees all out of proportion to the actual monetary amounts involved. Immigrant and emigrant taxpayers who have failed to comply with these requirements despite their best efforts face huge fines. In response, voluntary groups are picking up the slack and holding seminars at their own expense to warn immigrant taxpayers about the burdens they face. The World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper based in New York, reports on one such seminar held in Florida this past week. I’ve translated their article below.
While this is fairly old I have never seen it before. MP Jean Crowder (NDP) seems to be very much aware of the provisions of FATCA in this writeup and is none too pleased.
Given where Jean Crowder sits on the political spectrum in Canada this could be seen as something pretty close to a ultimate betrayal by American “Progressives” coming from their Canadian “Progressive” brethren.
IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, on Thursday (April 5), in a question and answer session at the National Press Club in Washington, indicated he would step down when his term expires in November. As we have all heard before, he repeates the numbers of how many have come forward (33,000) and how much they have collected ($4.4 billion). Yawn, yawn. And particularly offensive is the following:
The United States is in serious financial trouble. In 2011, the Federal Government borrowed over 40 cents for every dollar it spent, and the Federal Reserve Bank bought 61% of all the debt that the United States Treasury issued. When the Federal Reserve buys the debt, it is called “quantitative easing”, which is a euphemism for creating money out thin air (not money printing--but the creation of electronic money). Eventually, that will lead to high inflation, which is already becoming painfully visible in the prices for food and gas.
Continue reading
It’s seems to take a couple of months for them to be published, but here’s the link to the Federal Register for those who would like to check periodically. Anyone care to make a guess what they would be? I say 850 Q1.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/search?conditions%5Bterm%5D=Section+6039G&commit=Go
