http://www.roberts.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=0bc26938-590c-4d20-b573-86f2b31841dd
I couldn’t copy and past the text but read and have a good laugh.
The General Social Survey and Americans abroad: “true Americans live in America”
1996 seemed to be a pretty good year to be an American abroad. The U.S. was at the height of its global prestige. The State Department had several years earlier ended its policy of automatically revoking U.S. citizenship from Americans who naturalised elsewhere. And there was little motivation to give up the blue passport anyway: ordinary diaspora wage-earners with non-U.S. retirement accounts and mutual funds ignored all the international financial reporting forms created under the Nixon administration’s Bank Secrecy Act or the Reagan administration’s Tax Reform Act — and the IRS had no complaint because it knew that none of this paperwork could possibly generate more revenue than it would cost to process in the first place.
Yet this benign neglect of Americans abroad was by no means an expression of support. Homelanders were hostile to the idea of an American diaspora: in a national survey, nearly three-quarters of people in the U.S. thought that “living in America for most of your life” was an important part of being “truly American”. This widespread societal consensus on the territorial nature of Americanness was even supported, and supported quite strongly, by a surprising group: native-born Americans who had lived abroad for five years or longer, among whom 85% agreed with this proposition. And over the next decade, this view would only strengthen.
Switzerland voted against joining OVDI (Lex USA)
Rejecting US threats, the National Counsil tossed “Lex USA”. The big question now is if the US will follow through with its threats of destroying 18 banks, and how many innocent people will be harmed in the process. Yesterday, Postfinance expressed great fear that it might be the target of US wrath since it is one of the last banks which still accepts US clients living in Switzerland. My best guess is that the US needs to use Switzerland as a scape goat to scare the world into joining FATCA, since FATCA would otherwise fail.
The general view in Switzerland seems to be that if some banks did wrong, then they should be held responsible for their actions without the parliament being involved, while those in favor of Lex USA generally feared the American blackmail.
A lot of commentary that I have read so far in the US seemed to lean more in favor of Switzerland. There were a few calls for war, kicking Swiss out of the US or prohibiting Americans living in Switzerland from having a local bank account, but otherwise many individuals showed an interested in respecting personal privacy and resisting foreign powers.
The votes can be seen here.
This new American chocolate which does not melt is a bit like #LexUSA, containing inside secret materials.
— Marie P Bender (@mariebender) June 19, 2013
DOJ #FBAR lawsuit may test 8th amendment! It’s about time.
Prologue – Department of Justice Exhibits Trophies from FBAR Fundraiser (http://www.justice.gov/tax/offshore_compliance_intiative.htm)
Disclaimer: I want to make it clear that I support the principle that one should obey the law. I do believe tax evasion should be punished. But, I also believe that punishments should be proportional to the crime. It is becoming increasingly clear that FBAR penalties violate any conceivable principle of fairness and morality. Good citizenship requires one to support the principle that it is important that the government adhere to high moral principles and standards. Given a choice of having offshore tax evasion and a completely unprincipled and predatory government, I would opt for the former.
____________________________________________
@AtticusinCanada The DOJ is "The Ministry of Love" http://t.co/PSYbgqYlAQ – What an #Orwellian World! http://t.co/p7ldrDJUjp
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) June 12, 2013
Note that they proudly include the Curran widow who they simply extorted 21 million dollars from. This makes me sick for the reasons given here. The U.S. government is not A predator. The U.S. government is THE predator. The time has come for these “so called” lawyers to put their energy into a search for justice rather than a search for fees (click on the previous link – really).
It appears that the names on the trophy list are people who have agreed to pay the fines. They probably thought that by “paying” they would put their adventures in FBAR behind them. They are wrong. They will need counseling the rest of their lives.
FATCA Reciprocity Will Now Target Delaware? Is That What G8 Communique Means?
G8 leaders agree tax evasion measures
Continue reading the main story
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Leaders of the G8 major economies have agreed new measures to clamp down on money launderers, illegal tax evaders and corporate tax avoiders.
They include requiring that shell companies – often used to exploit tax loopholes and invest money anonymously – identify their effective owners.
Governments also agreed to give each other automatic access to information on their residents’ tax affairs.
https://twitter.com/FATCA_Fallout/status/346995611779878913
Why Americans renounce citizenship: real stories of ordinary people who prefer to be citizens of other countries
After the jump I’ve translated two recent human interest stories from South Korean and Taiwanese newspapers about young people who decided to give up U.S. citizenship in order to acquire the citizenship of the country in which they were actually living. These stories have no useful legal or procedural information for any U.S. Persons wondering about the wait time to get an appointment at the embassy in Seoul or Taipei or the niceties of filling out Form 8854 — but hopefully they can serve as a much-needed antidote to the U.S. media’s persistent refusal to mention any renunciant whose net worth is less than eight figures.
Homelanders — even lawyers who should know better — continue to spread the demagogic myth that renunciants are all people who got rich in the U.S. and then suddenly decided one day to up and leave in response to the latest political outrage committed by whatever political party the author doesn’t like. Jack Reed and Chuck Schumer are pounding the drum for their new amendment to impose permanent exile on ex-citizens. So it’s more important than ever to point out the reality of who gives up U.S. citizenship: ordinary people pursuing ordinary lives in the countries of their choosing.
An #IRS #OVDI ORDEAL with a Happy Ending. An ‘Opt Out’ Success Story as Told by “Not that Lisa”
“Not that Lisa” has just had her ‘Opt Out’ success story published at Jack Townsend blog. It is accompanied by his comments which I encourage you to read.
I came to know of Lisa during my dark days on Jack’s blog as “anon5Percent”. Later, due to her efforts to find me, I got to know her personally via phone and email conversations. She started commenting here as Lisa and evolved to Not that Lisa to eliminate confusion between her and another commenter.
I could not be more pleased about this success, and only sorry for her that it has taken so much frustration, anxiety, expense, and LCUs, which still required the intervention of the TAS for the IRS to “do the right thing”. I asked her permission tonight, to also highlight her 30 month saga to add to the resource of self help material on Isaac Brock Society.
I thought it was important to headline this ‘ORDEAL’ as many places as possible. I think she is being too generous to call her escape from the IRS penalty extraction processing factory a mere ‘Odyssey’. It is a total waste of taxpayers time and money for naught, and represents one of the reasons that ACA has called this abuse to the attention of the committees in Congress who are investigating IRS T-party scandal. We can not let this milestone pass as just another low profile comment on the OVDI Drudgery thread lost to a larger audience.
Below are the documents that she has made available to Isaac Brock Society. They are uploaded here for others to access and use as examples for their struggles.
Not that Lisa – FINAL My OVDI Odyssey
Not that Lisa – FINAL Opt Out letter
Not that Lisa – FINAL Opt Out Reasonable Cause Arguments
Not tht Lisa – FINAL Streamlined Program Acceptance Letter
Not that Lisa – FINAL Mitigated FBAR Level II Non-Willful Penalties
Not that Lisa – FINAL Letter 3800
What follows are her comments:
Commenter John: A Traitor to Canada
From Michael Power’s Dot Indicia Blog:
http://michaelpower.ca/2013/04/fatca-revisited/
Hi Michael,
Have any of the “privacy experts” considered that every single brokerage firm already performs the same filter and requires the same determination for people who want to trade on US stock exchanges? All IIROC firms already have agreements with the IRS to share US Person determination in order to avoid US withholding taxes for all of their customers.
The privacy impact is true on US Persons, however that being said, these persons should either file their US taxes or relinquish citizenship, they have a choice! Tax treaties ensure relatively fair treatment.
Non-US persons in Canada will be slightly inconvenienced with being asked if they are truly non-US. Their information WILL BE PROTECTED and not sent to CRA (except for regular tax reporting).
It is absolutely astounding how quick groups like the green party are to complain that the top 1% don’t pay their share, however once a critical, world-wide tax evasion tool like FATCA comes in, they are quick to complain about privacy.
Breaking story: U.S. immigration lawyer actually understands how and why people renounce U.S. citizenship
Many of us emigrants here at the Isaac Brock Society have a rather low opinion of U.S. immigration lawyers. Whether it’s mainland China’s one-trick-pony visa consultants who push their wealthy clients into getting utterly unnecessary EB-5 green cards, birth tourism promoters who forget to mention to their decidedly more middle-class clients how much trouble they will have enrolling their American baby in schools in their home countries, clueless Floridians who can’t possibly understand why someone who lived in Canada for four decades wouldn’t want a U.S. passport, or racist San Buenaventura nutters on Yahoo! Answers who go around claiming that oil sheikhs would pay a million dollars for a U.S. passport, this species of attorney often combines greed, jingoism, and complete ignorance of local laws in their clients’ countries of citizenship or U.S. tax laws relating to immigration and citizenship status.
So it’s fortunate to see there are at least some exceptions; let us give credit where credit is due. In an article in India Abroad magazine entitled “Pitfalls of renouncing citizenship”, immigration lawyer Tahmina Watson of Watson Immigration Law in Seattle gives a surprisingly fair and accurate overview of the heated topic of renunciation of citizenship, stemming from a situation that one of her clients faced.
Traumatized by the IRS and US reaching into Canada? (UPDATE 3: London, England too)
Update 3:
Those in or near London, England might be interested that a similar event to take place there on Sunday, July 28, 2013, is in the works. I will post the details as the become available.
UDPATE 2:
Saturday, June 15
Don Mills United Church – 126 O’Connor Dr., Toronto, Ontario M4K 2K7
Click here for directions (at the corner of Pape and O’Connor, see google maps). There is some street parking.
Doors will open at 9:45 a.m.