http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000305368
American Samoans’ lawsuit against Washington over “U.S. national” status
In July 2012, Leneuoti Tuaua and four other plaintiffs filed suit in the D.C. District Court against the U.S. government and three State Department officials, claiming that American Samoans should be entitled to U.S. citizenship rather than their current “U.S. national” status. The lawsuit was dismissed in June 2013, but the plaintiffs appealed to the D.C. Circuit in February.
A number of legal scholars have filed amici briefs for the appellants, including Michael Ramsey of the the Tenth Amendment Center. More recently, the Department of Justice filed its own amicus brief attempting to rebut the appellants’ claims. Marianas Variety reports:
On Tuesday, the Obama administration on filed a brief before the District of Columbia Circuit Court arguing that Americans born in U.S. territories have no constitutional right to citizenship. Relying on a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions known as the Insular Cases that have been compared to Plessy v. Ferguson, the Obama administration defended a federal statute that expressly creates two classes of American nationals: those who enjoy the protections of U.S. citizenship and those who do not.
One of the more obscure consequences of this two-class system is a corner-case interaction between the Immigration & Nationality Act and the Internal Revenue Code: U.S. non-citizen nationals abroad are not “U.S. Persons” for tax purposes under 26 USC § 7701(a)(30).
This has no effect on American Samoans at home, since they — like every else — pay taxes to their local government for the services they actually use. It does make things simpler for American Samoans who move to Apia or Auckland or Australia or beyond. Due to the U.S.’ strange system of non-resident taxation — shared with only one other country on the planet, Eritrea — U.S. citizens (including Puerto Ricans and U.S. Virgin Islanders) and green card holders who live in other countries must spend thousands of dollars on professional assistance checking in with the IRS every year to prove the obvious fact that they’re already paying taxes to the country where they live and owe no U.S. tax. However, non-citizen nationals abroad are exempt from the IRS’ requirements.
But for the far more numerous American Samoans living in the fifty states, who pay the same taxes as their neighbours, this exemption is useless — and nevertheless, they pay a high cost for it: they cannot enjoy the same voting rights as people from other U.S. territories, nor many other rights enjoyed by other Americans, such as sponsoring a foreign spouse for a non-quota green card. Under Washington’s bizarre ideology, the price for freedom of emigration is your right to vote and your right to family life.
Obama: Corporate Deserters!
So they’re technically renouncing their U.S. citizenship. They’re declaring they’re based someplace else even though most of their operations are here. Some people are calling these companies “corporate deserters.”
And it’s only a few big corporations so far. …
— Barack Obama (24 July 2014) White House Transcript
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/24/remarks-president-economy-los-angeles-ca
Post Tim Horton’s, Obama looks like he’s thinking about (1) Canada as haven (2) the individual lives worldwide that the U.S. has willfully been driving into the desperations of financial ruin, severe psychic stress, marital breakup, contemplation of suicide — and skyrocketing rates of renunciation.
What really ticks Obama off is those big corporations. He talks about them just like they were individuals. Oopsie. Category mistake!
Statistics on U.S. passport issuance abroad
Peter Spiro has talked about the possibility of Secret Americans (put the passport in a drawer and forget about it) on Opinio Juris and one of his latest posts about it is well worth reading.
So how could this phenomenon be measured? What would be the indicators? Passports not renewed? Any ideas, anyone?
Unfortunately, the available statistics are not very good. The Bureau of Consular Affairs publishes four tables of passport application/issuance statistics. At first glance, two look useful for our purposes: “Passport Issuance by State per Fiscal Year (2007 to 2013)”, and “U.S. Passports Issued per Fiscal Year (2013 – 1996)”.
You might think of subtracting the former number from the latter to get the number of passport issuances abroad. That at least gives us a baseline figure: in 2007, State seems to have issued 298,509 U.S. passports abroad. After that, things get more complicated, because in 2008 they introduced “passport cards”. From then on, the overall passport issuance statistics are given both with passport cards included and broken out, but it’s not clear how to interpret the state-level statistics: passports cards included or excluded, or number of applications whether for passports or cards or both?
Whichever interpretation you prefer, it’s hard to make much sense of the numbers. There’s clearly been a decline in passport issuance abroad between 2011 and 2013, but does that still leave us above the 2007 issuance level, or below it? How much of that is normal cyclical fluctuation, and how much of that is due to members of the diaspora deciding that now is a good time to avoid any contact with the increasingly diaspora-hating Homeland government?
Today is the 200th Anniversary of the Burning of the Whitehouse
So join with me in the singing of the commemorative song, and toast with me to all that is is possible in a group effort! We are fighting our War of 2012, FATCA.
China news: The USA is “a disgusting thief spying over his neighbor’s fence”
China fighter jets intercepted a US military patrol plane flying near its coast. The Pentagon reacted that their maneuver was “unsafe and unprofessional”. China says that the USA is “a disgusting thief spying over his neighbor’s fence”.
That is what FATCA is. FATCA is the United States being a disgusting thief spying on the bank accounts of people who have citizens in their countries of residence. By forcing FATCA on other countries, the USA is indeed the biggest rogue nation in the world, and “spying over the fence” is an appropriate metaphor–the fence being that of normal banking privacy. The USA is a financial voyeur.
Here is the full article of the Sina News response originally in Chinese (translation at Simon Black, Sovereign Man, emphasis his):
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Latest Foreign Earned Income Exclusion statistics: in five years, IRS offshore crusades added a hundred thousand ordinary new filers who don’t owe any U.S. tax
Via TaxProf Blog, we learn that the IRS has released its annual report on Individual Income Tax Returns, 2012. Page 9 has statistics on Foreign Earned Income Exclusion usage, from which we can calculate the average amount of the FEIE per return:
| 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of returns w/FEIE | 371,885 | 396,405 | 415,519 | 445,276 | 475,386 |
| +6.59% | +4.82% | +7.16% | +6.76% | ||
| Total amount of excluded income (constant 1990 US$ million) |
13,899 | 14,907 | 15,482 | 16,305 | 16,866 |
| +7.25% | +3.86% | +5.31% | +3.44% | ||
| Average FEIE per return (constant 1990 US$) |
37,374 | 37,604 | 37,258 | 36,618 | 35,478 |
| +0.62% | -0.92% | -1.72% | -3.11% |
Here’s another way of looking at these numbers. Assume that all of the FEIE users in 2008 continued to be FEIE users in 2012 (or equivalently, that they were replaced by similar filers or married-filing-jointly couples), and that over that period they suffered the same drop of 0.96% in earned income (in constant 1990 US$) that all U.S. returns demonstrated on average during that period. What would the average FEIE for each of the one hundred thousand marginal new filers have to be in order to fit with the above figures?
Answer (again, in constant 1990 US$): US$29,709, almost exactly the same as the average earned income across all U.S tax returns.
Non-US Accounts Being Reviewed in UK at the Expense of Non-US Persons
#FATCA #IGA ALL British trusts will be reviewed at expense of client; even w/out ANY US indicia http://t.co/2hL3nOXMes Please RT widely
— U.S. Expat Canada (@USExpatCanada) August 23, 2014
“Some individual customers are being contacted by their banks or other financial providers if, for example, they appear to have links with the US or own property there. But tens of thousands of other families are beginning to receive letters, and invoices, simply because they have established run-of-the-mill family trusts.”
The family in the article owes at least $635 CDN plus VAT. This is beyond outrageous. At what point will people begin to take action?
Article is HERE
ACA Update on RBT & Request for Testimonials
American Citizens Abroad has posted an update with information concerning their efforts to replace Citizenship-based Taxation with Residence-based Taxation. They are also calling for testimonials about how legislation is affecting you and for your support in by writing the Tax Committee directly responsible for tax reform and asking for the implementation of RBT.
Update on Residence-Based Taxation RBT – August 2014
ACA has been hard at work in Washington, DC bringing RBT to the attention of the legislature and the Administration. ACA has met with all the members of the Americans Abroad Caucus, and the Ways & Means and Senate Finance committees. ACA has been asked by the committees involved in tax reform to provide our input on the tax treatment of Americans living and working overseas. We are proud that ACA is now the government “go to” source for information on many of the issues affecting overseas Americans, and we regularly submit comments to government hearings on issues important to our membership.
Media attention on the issues of overseas Americans is growing. More and more major media outlets like Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, Time, Politico and others are talking about RBT and FATCA. Much of this attention is due to the ACA commitment to bringing the issues of overseas Americans to the attention of the media. ACA is regularly solicited for interviews and quoted in the media.
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Jack Townsend says that Americans don’t admire me
Jack Townsend says that civil disobedience is only really justifiable in the case that there is a possibility of jury nullification, but no jury of US citizens would find a tax evader Canadian citizen “not guilty” for shirking the US tax code. Furthermore, he says that Americans don’t admire those who do their disobedience in hiding. I offer here the continuation of our discussion: