A headline from the morning news caught my attention:

“June 13 (Reuters) – Honda Motor Co Ltd said on Wednesday it will recall about 50,000 Civic small cars in the United States from the 2012 model year for a potential driveshaft assembly issue that could lead to loss of engine power. “

It occurred to me that there are more mechanisms in place to notify a consumer of an issue effecting product safety than the US government uses in informing its citizens abroad of their duty to pay US taxes. What if manufacturers were to leave safety recalls to foreign media, or to print it in mouse-type on the last page of a document that a consumer may or may now renew every 10 years, or adopt a laissez faire regard for the law that leads to sellers of the product not informing purchasers of an important safety instruction? Yet the US government continues to punish its citizens by way of onerous penalties and threats of exile for neglecting to report forms that these otherwise law-abiding citizens could not have reasonably known about, and continues to make little in the way of effort to facilitate.

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I came across an interesting article on IPolitics.ca about a deepening mystery about Canadian’s holding bank accounts in Liechtenstein. I linked to article below but its behind a registration wall so I copied and pasted the most intriguing passage [Editor’s note: I’ve rerouted the link through google and so the entire article should be available]:

The mystery surrounding Canadian owners of offshore accounts in a secretive bank in Liechtenstein has deepened with the discovery by the Canada Revenue Agency that nearly half the names it was given are not the real owners of the accounts, iPolitics has learned.

CRA’s probe has determined that 51 of the 106 names it received of account holders in the LGT Bank in the tax haven of Liechtenstein “were not the true beneficial owners for the account.”

“With regards to the 51 cases that were not the true beneficial owners for the accounts, the CRA has determined, through audit actions, that they do not have any tax obligation in relation to the information obtained,” explained Philippe Brideau, spokesman for the Canada Revenue Agency. “However, the CRA has taken actions to determine the true beneficiaries and has taken audit actions to ensure compliance with the Income Tax Act.”

Brideau said further details are protected under confidentiality provisions of the Income Tax Act.

I am going to put out the supposition that whoever the “real” owners of these accounts are they aren’t Canadian and furthermore the real owners of these account are residents of a certain other country to the south and the premise of FATCA just got blown out of the water. (The information CRA got was stolen by a disgruntled bank employee so even the bank didn’t know who the real owners are). What is interesting is these “51” people appear to be free and clear as a matter of Canadian law so if a certain other’s countries Justice Department wants to do what it normally wants to do its going to have to pick the same type of fight with Canada that is currently ongoing with Switzerland over club “51”. I am going to post this over at Jack Townsend’s blog to see what he thinks of it.

Mystery deepens around Canadian accounts in secretive offshore tax haven

Interestingly there were four account holders outside of the 51 that were fully compliant and 22 that were partially compliant.

I’d like to talk to someone in BC — on the record, which means I would use your name — for an article I’m preparing for BC Business magazine on the FATCA nightmare. I know this would be a leap, and fully understand if no one wants to front up. I stayed anonymous for quite a while myself on this. But I need a real story/anecdote to get this piece moving. My email is don_whiteley at telus dot net, anyone who thinks they could do this drop me a note and we’ll have a conversation first, just to make sure you’re comfortable. My deadline on this is June 28th (and I’m away next week).

DW

I have completed the transfer of the registrant for isaacbrocksociety.com and immediately used our new host’s free service to forward that domain to isaacbrocksociety.ca.  As soon as this has propagated across the internet, no one will be able to get to the old wordpress site using the dot.com address.  The transfer has been successful in redirecting to the correct page at the dot.ca site.  So there is no need for authors to go through their old posts and change links.  The only thing is that comments do not have the same permalink as before and it may be useful to change links to comments.

I personally have access to the old site (isaacbrocksociety.wordpress.com), if necessary.  But at this point, I have trouble seeing why it would be necessary for anyone to access the old site.

(I’ve just checked, and it is clear that subscribers to the old blog do not need change their subscriptions to the new blog because the redirect takes them directly to the correct page).