A comment on Update on the IRS FS for U.S. and Dual Citizens Living Outside The United States
The Tax Advocate within the IRS has written a report critical of the IRS in its handling of OVDP and OVDI participants and US taxpayers abroad identifying it as a “Most Serious Problem”. For my own purposes I’ve distilled into a few critical paragraphs: Continue reading
In his article Tax Evaders Renounce U.S. Citizenship Noel Brinkhoff writes:
Rather than deal with the complexities of U.S. tax law, Americans living overseas are increasingly renouncing their citizenship in order to avoid paying their income taxes.
Fortunately, the rest of the short article is a little bit better, as he refers to the complexity of the tax filing requirements and the IRS’s bait and switch tactics. Still, I am disgusted by the assumption of guilt that if you renounce you are a tax evader.
It’s funny that you can be a foreigner like me (originally from India, now a Canadian citizen) and do most of your business in the US and not get taxed on it. I run an internet company incorporated in Canada and almost all my customers are American. I don’t file anything with the IRS because legally I don’t have to.
But if you happen to have been born in the US or have an American parent and don’t earn income from there they still want to tax you. It’s like a penalty for having any American association. On top of that no foreigners will want to form a partnership with you due to FATCA. Continue reading
Roger Conklin responds to markpinetree who laments that the impression that most Americans have of US citizens abroad is that they are rich tax cheats, and says, “Lets work to clarify the issues!”
Roger Conklin responded JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 9:57 PM:
Oh how I wish you were right. But the perception cards are so stacked against us that it a task of inconceivable magnitude.
Several years back one Congresman, I have forgotten his name [Bill Alexander, see below], who had always won reelection by wide margins, took up our cause. He introduced legislation to abolish citizenship based taxation and replace it with the residence based taxation of every other country. He had no support from his congressional colleagues. It became a major issue in the next election with his opponent majoring on the fact that this Congressman was wasting his time helping American tax evaders living abroad rather than working on the issues important to his constituents in the district he represented. He lost his re-election, going down in an flames. That bitter lesson did not go unnoticed by others when going to run for re-election. It is an issue that just does not resonate positively with he voting public.
I started a forum post about this, but I feel that this is so important that it needs to be shared here to spread the word!
Everyone and their grandmother heard about SOPA and PIPA and the huge amount of publicity that was generated recently to kill the bills. But did you know that there is already a global agreement on the books called ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)? No, this is not a US law – It’s worse: it is a multilateral treaty that has been negotiated over many years by the US, Canada, EU and others in almost absolute secrecy. One top EU official even resigned recently over how the negotiations were carried out.
There is a new website that launched several weeks ago that I highly recommend: isaacbrocksociety.com. The engines behind this site are people I know and it has good, first-hand information about
Cross posted from USxCanada InfoShop
A search for the data that underlies “estimates” of the numbers of U.S. citizens resident outside the United States does not lead far. A total of 6.35 million, excluding military personnel, is one handy number.
A map [2] provided as part of the information on the web site of American Citizens Abroad (ACA) [1] appears to be as good a piece of information as any that can be obtained. And even that map data is contradictory (see note following citation).
ACA and Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO) pass along figures said to be provided by the U.S. State Department. The only level of detail is for seven regions that cover the entire world. These organizations have been hacking away valiantly for years at this data situation. It seems peculiar that a direct State Department source for this same data cannot easily be found.
Several people have received the same letter from Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. CanuckDoc has posted a reply.
US Treasury Aims To Lower FATCA Burdens.
This article popped up in my Google news feed.
The first half is a rehash of what we already know, but the last six paragraphs shed a bit of light on how FATCA will proceed. Note the comments about a higher dollar threshold for reporting requirements and the possibility of having the FFIs report to the government which in turn would report to the IRS.
Now I have heard through a friend that works for a large investment firm here in Canada that at the moment they only plan to report customers that fall under the category of non-resident status in Canada. Don’t take this as gospel because as we all know the rules can change at any time. It’s not clear what other investment firms are doing, but banks are likely to follow a stricter set of rules.
