Here is the full Audio for the event. Albright represented Clinton. Her response to the questions was quite cold and standoffish.
Continue reading
Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury released it’s 2016 Model Tax Treaty.
I suspect that people will interpret this in terms of how it affects their individual situations. This gives a huge clue with respect to information exchange and how the U.S. views “double taxation”, citizenship-based taxation and related issues.
In the past, Brokers have been tremendously resourceful in analyzing complex documents.
I invite you to read the model agreement and comment on whether you see any improvement in how it affects your situation in different countries. Common sense dictates, that the text of the model treaty can be used as an interpretive aid for interpreting the existing treaties.
I am particularly interested in whether you see anything in this which would affect: pensions, PFIC, foreign corporations, etc.
Is this about continuing double taxation or is it about ending double taxation?
Is this Treaty better suited to justifying the exchange of information under FATCA?
When (if) you comment, please make clear which country you live in.
I notice right at the beginning, in Article I it reads:
4. Except to the extent provided in paragraph 5 of this Article, this Convention shall not affect the taxation by a Contracting State of its residents (as determined under Article 4 (Resident)) and its citizens. Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Convention, a former citizen or former long-term resident of a Contracting State may be taxed in accordance with the laws of that Contracting State.
5. The provisions of paragraph 4 of this Article shall not affect:
a) the benefits conferred by a Contracting State under paragraph 3 of Article 7 (Business Profits), paragraph 2 of Article 9 (Associated Enterprises), paragraph 7 of Article 13 (Gains), subparagraph (b) of paragraph 1, paragraphs 2, 3 and 6 of Article 17 (Pensions, Social Security, Annuities, Alimony and Child Support), paragraph 3 of Article 18 (Pension Funds), and Articles 23 (Relief From Double Taxation), 24 (Non-Discrimination) and 25 (Mutual Agreement Procedure); and
b) the benefits conferred by a Contracting State under paragraph 1 of Article 18 (Pension Funds), and Articles 19 (Government Service), 20 (Students and Trainees) and 27 (Members of Diplomatic Missions and Consular Posts), upon individuals who are neither citizens of, nor have been admitted for permanent residence in, that Contracting State.
UPDATE February 13, 2016
This describes the reaction of a non-US Person, listening to the stories of expats at a meeting designed for them to speak freely. It starts just a bit before the speaker describes his background which speaks to the degree of fear he had seen/experienced before he came to Canada, from government oppression.
Dr. Donald Young comments on A FATCA-Related Suicide Part II
Obviously I cannot comment on this matter without knowing more facts. I can only say that the situation that many Americans abroad experience due to FACTA and the threats made by the U.S. government will clearly have negative emotional consequences for many and at times severely so. I can attest to this as I have seen and treated it clinically. The possibility of suicidal thinking and behaviour comes as no surprise to me from a psychiatric perspective. The fact of being threatened by the strongest and most aggressive nation in the world is unsettling for even the most psychologically robust individual. Those prone to anxiety, depression, physiological responses to stress and other difficulties ( and this likely involves a quarter of the population at least ) will be all the more vulnerable to the irrational threats and demands of the American government. We are being threatened with economic ruin, branded as criminals and told we will be hunted down. This situation results in a prolonged degree of stress that will have deleterious emotional and often physical stress that will certainly take its toll.The fact that there are often no clear answers as to what to do or how to do it only worsens the emotional upset and results in a form of learned helplessness. We may well have just witnessed a tragic result of what the American government is doing to people who simply want to live in peace and leave their former country behind, assuming they ever even lived in it. And from what I can see there is no solution and no save harbour in sight.
cross-posted from citizenshipsolutions.ca
New instructions to renounce or relinquish US citizenship in Canada – Email: CanadaCLNInquiries@state.gov to start: https://t.co/mWuVjloIa4
— John Richardson – Counsellor for US persons abroad (@ExpatriationLaw) February 17, 2016
It appears that the demand to renounce U.S. citizenship continues to grow.
For those who want to book appointments to relinquish or renounce U.S.
citizenship in Canada:
(Interestingly, at least for the moment, Canada seems to continue to require Form 4079 an issue that I have discussed here.)
cross-posted from citizenshipsolutions.ca
If @SenTedCruz had NOT renounced CDN citizenship he could have escaped US S. 877A Exit Tax https://t.co/vHaMojxgzM pic.twitter.com/QuAVA8qfx1
— John Richardson – Counsellor for US persons abroad (@ExpatriationLaw) February 16, 2016
Ted Cruz was born in 1971 in Canada. He was therefore born a Canadian citizen. He claims to have been born to a U.S. citizen mother and was therefore a U.S. citizen by birth. (Whether he qualifies as a “
natural born citizen” is a different question.) As a Canadian citizen he had the right (prior to renouncing Canadian citizenship) to live in Canada. Had Mr. Cruz, moved back to Canada, he could have avoided the U.S. S. 877A Exit Tax. Incredible but true. It will be interesting to see whether Mr. Cruz regrets renouncing his Canadian citizenship. As you will see, by renouncing Canadian citizenship, Mr. Cruz surrendered his right to avoid the United States S. 877A Exit Tax.
Here is why …
The S. 877A Exit Tax rules in the Internal Revenue Code, are the most punitive in relation to U.S. citizens living outside the United States (AKA Americans abroad). To put it simply, with respect to Americans abroad, the S. 877A Exit Tax rules:
– operate to confiscate assets that are located in other nations; and
– operate to confiscate assets that were acquired by U.S. citizens after they moved from the United States.
There is not and has never been an “Exit Tax” anywhere else that operates in this way. The application of the S. 877A Exit Tax to assets located in other nations, is both an example of “American Exceptionalism” at its finest and a strong deterrent to exercising the right of expatriation granted in the “Expatriation Act of 1868“.
But, the “Exit Tax” applies ONLY to “Covered Expatriates” and “dual citizens from birth” can avoid being “Covered Expatriates”
…
As has been previously discussed, the Exit Tax applies ONLY to “ covered expatriates“. There are two statutory defenses to becoming a “covered expatriate”. This post is to discuss the “dual citizen from birth” defense to being treated as a “covered expatriate”. I have discovered that this defense is NOT as well known or understood as it should be.
The statute granting the “dual citizen from birth” defense to “Covered Expatriate” status reads as follows:
Is Obama picking Merkel’s pocket? Germany paid 656 million EUR to help America collect supposed 92 million EUR from dual US/German citizens. German bank customers each paid 12 EUR for the privilege of supporting Barack’s budget.
Do you suppose that we could immediately dispel any myth that Americans in America are sending their money to Germany to avoid taxation? I know it might be hard for a guy like Mythster Stack, but let’s try.
USA’s estimated FATCA take was 8.7 billion USD over 11 years (or 7.9 billion USD over 10 years). (Never mind that all of that supposed revenue disappears by lost taxation of US-owned foreign financial institutions) Knowing that “fair share” is a common theme of the Obama administration, Germany should be assumed to provide its per-capita share of FATCA income. (Well, then again, it could mean more, since, to Obama, “fair share” means that someone other than he or his hangers-on have to foot the bill for his largesse). Germany’s population is 1.16% of the non-US world population. Hence, the theoretical Obama FATCA take from Germany ought to be 91,640,000 USD. At the averaged exchange rates of the IRS itself, Obama’s FATCA Euro take out of Germany is a measly 74, 700,000 EUR.
(alternatively, let’s suppose that Germany’s “fair share” is as 1 country of the 190 countries of the world. This means that Germany might be contributing 41,600,000 USD / 33,800,000 EUR.)
This is a method of analyzing German FACTA implementation costs. German FATCA implementation was estimated to be 386 million EUR upfront, and 30 million EUR per year thereafter: 656 million EUR over a standard 10 years. Knowing that interest rates are near zero, there is no need to consider Present Values.
So, Obama required Germany to pay 656 million EUR so as to help USA get 74,700,000 EUR? Obama could have just done the greatest economic con ever done on another country. Obama enacted this con with LOADS of tax propaganda, calling countries such as Germany “offshore”, that Americans were sending their money to Germany in order to avoid taxation. In reality, all Obama was doing was to get Germany’s banks to identify the 109,000 Americans living in Germany.
Whaddya say we just stop here and let this ludicrousness stand for itself? Well, no, it all just gets worse.
Germany’s EU rep says that it has to “thank America for this (FATCA)” (at 49:00 of this video).
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Following a suggestion made by Bubblebustin at the Media and Blog Articles thread today, here are some links to an excellent series of personal blog posts by a 23 year old woman who calls herself The Dualist:
FINDING OUT I WAS A 23 YEAR-OLD US TAX “DELINQUENT”
ASSESSING MY OPTIONS FOR ADDRESSING MY NEWLY-DISCOVERED ‘DELINQUENT’ US TAX SITUATION
As Bubblebustin describes, “A young woman discovers her US tax and filing obligations and realizes she’s damned no matter what she does. She speaks for many of us when describing her OMG moment to the current struggle whether to renounce a citizenship she still identifies with.”
The Dualist was born in the UK, moved to the US as a toddler and lived there until the age of thirteen, then moved back to the UK. Here are some excerpts from her vividly-told story:
I have introduced myself to people as half-English and half-American ever since I was old enough to respond to the question, “where are you from?”. It is almost always the first thing I say when asked to tell somebody about myself. I never reflected too deeply on what being half-English and half-American actually meant. It has just been the simplest, shortest way of alluding to certain personal circumstances, like having an American father and an English mother; as well as experiences, like moving between England and the States growing up, that have contributed to who I am.
It all began during a client dinner in the City in London one evening. I was sitting at a large table with around a dozen people. Half of them were our firms’ clients, and the other half were my colleagues. The most senior employee of the client firm present, an American, noticed my accent and asked me where I was from. I explained that I was a dual citizen, and that I had grown up in the US. After a few polite questions about where I had grown up, and when I had left the country, he abruptly asked:
“So, do you file your US taxes?”
In the period after the initial “oh my god” moment I felt seriously paranoid, scared and confused about what I should do. The whole concept of citizenship-based taxation was so bizarre to me, and its enforcement rules so disproportionate, that trying to come to terms with it all could be best described as disorienting. ‘Surely this is all just a big misunderstanding,’ I often thought, ‘or a bad dream!’
Why does the US government want to make our lives so difficult when we have done nothing wrong? Why are they burdening us to continually prove that we are innocent, and invading our privacy using third parties and foreign governments to make sure that we’re telling the IRS the truth? Why are they terrorizing us with threats of bankrupting penalties, incarceration and (very recently) passport revocation? What exactly are they hoping to achieve, when the vast majority of us do not even make enough money to owe taxes to the US?
Can they talk about the ‘land of the free’, or being ‘leaders of the free world’ with a straight face anymore?
Continued from Perhaps After Reading This You Could Suggest a Title for This Post
The first part of this story was relayed in the post “Perhaps After Reading This You Could Suggest a Title for This Post. As you may already know, the father of an expatriate in Sweden left 2 letters as a comment, written to his Senator informing her his son had been considerably disturbed by FATCA and had committed suicide out of desparation.
Jonathan Andrew Prince was born in California on February 26,1969. He attended university as an undergrad at “Cal Poly” and went to Sweden to further his studies in brain chemistry and obtain his Ph.D. He remained in Sweden, married, had two children and a career at the Karolinska Institutet. Some have questioned whether this story is a hoax; whether Jonathan was a real person; did he work at the Karolinska Institute and so on. All I can say is that to the best of my knowledge, based upon my conversations and emails with his father and my own searching on the internet, he most definitely was a real person. His obituary notice is linked at the end of this post.He passed away on June 20, 2015. Here are a few links that speak to his work:
Microsoft Academic Search Author Jonathan A Prince
aminer.org profile Jonathan A Prince
Further, some claim he could not possibly have done what he did due to “tax problems.” Or that it is not fair to claim that this was the result of FATCA because it almost certainly was due to some mental or emotional instability. My response to that is no competent therapist would ever separate a person’s actions from all the accompanying features of the person’s life. The mental and emotional states are intimately interlinked with the conditions of one’s employment, family dynamic and so on. It is not truly possible to separate the outside experiences of one’s life from their inner state. Here is a description of how a psychologist sees the effects of U.S. tax policy affecting expats.This comment was made in the context of the 2 meetings that were organized to offer people a chance to talk openly without any fear of being exposed; June 15, 2013 & March 29, 2014 (which Dr. Young was scheduled for but missed due to illness).
All of the emphases are mine:
In the words of Dr. Donald Young
For those U.S citizens who have elected to live abroad, be it in Canada or elsewhere, American tax policy can place such individuals in a position that engenders constant and severe emotional stress. The vindictiveness of the U.S. position, its unfairness and irrationality, the fact that neither the U.S. government nor tax and legal experts even know the rules and how to rationally proceed, and the constant threat of economic calamity are all factors that can be emotionally devastating. From my observations over the years in people ensnared in this situation, and I would count myself among us, it is common to experience substantial anxiety, depression, feelings of panic and foreboding, guilt over being branded a cheat and a criminal, fear, anger, resentment, and general feelings of helplessness and confusion. I have in fact seen some people who have become virtually suicidal at the prospect of losing everything for the “crime” of not paying taxes to a country they have not lived in for decades if ever at all. I am a clinical psychologist licensed to practice in Ontario with 35 years of experience. I have also been appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. In recent years I have had the opportunity to discuss and address these problems with many individuals who are trapped in these tragic circumstances
Along with John I am happy to make myself available in any of the forums or meetings that will be forthcoming. There is always strength in numbers and sometimes much can be gained by discussing common problems together in a group. I am also happy to chat or work with people individually with these concerns.
This is a link to the obituary . I am trying to post an actual picture but it is not coming out clearly enough to read. Will work on this.
One last thing for today. Many have commented as to how they cannot understand (or even don’t believe this story because of this) how a father could do such a thing with two young children. I suspect those who outright disbelieve it do not actually have children. Any honest parent will admit to the difficulty of the constant sacrifice required and how sometimes it simply is too much. Parents are not saints and they suffer the same myriad of issues as anyone else. And it is common knowledge in the counselling world that people who commit suicide feel extreme guilt at being the source of a problem, so the solution, in order to protect, is to take themselves out of the equation. No one would question a parent putting themself in front of a car to protect a child (even one who wasn’t their own). On a certain level, it is exactly the same thing. Life is not neat and tidy and clear sometimes.
Continued from Perhaps After Reading This You Could Suggest a Title for This Post
In order for the U.S. to gain $8.7 billion, the world was forced to pay between $58 billion to $170 billion. This is the reason why neither the US Congress nor the Obama administration released any #FATCA cost-benefit analysis.
There have been varied approaches to calculate the total cost of FATCA, many of which are shown in the FATCA Wiki article. The Chamber of Commerce had estimated $1 trillion to $2 trillion, whilst Forbes had estimated $8 billion per year. Neither had shown their methods. Another guest author had derived per-capita estimates to arrive at $200 billion FATCA cost. Another author had visualized that FATCA made an American priceless, by considering the average cost per U.S. person to be located.
It has also been shown, that nearly all of the supposed gains estimated to come to the government via FATCA, would be lost because of the lost tax revenue upon U.S.-owned financial institutions overseas. So, Wikipedia has summarized that #FATCA is a big loser.
In order to verify FATCA cost estimates, this method (put forth here by a guest contributor) looks at the costs estimated for each FFI, and totals the costs for all of the FFI’s registered in the FATCA FFI registration database. The search performed after the end of 2015 yielded 182,649 FFI’s.
We know that a very large bank (but not at all the largest) such as Scotia Bank would have paid $100 million to comply. However, it is not really known how many of those banks might exist. One must assume a quantity, such as 100 banks, 500 banks, or 1000 such banks in the world.
We also know that a small FFI would pay about $25,000 for smaller institutions, $100,000 – $500,000 for medium-size institutions, and $1,000,000 for larger institutions. What we don’t yet know, is how many firms are medium, large, or small. Therefore, we must do a number of scenarios to get the total picture.
We have all the base data, we only need to make a few scenarios, and total the costs for each group of FFI size, and to get the total cost per the scenario.
So, there you have the cost of 3 different scenarios!
Now, there are a number of potential variations in each individual piece of data. However, each input value could be adjusted appropriately, the scenario could be iterated, and a more refined number could be created. However that might be done, the variations are controlled within the limits of practicality.
Please evaluate the calculations and give feedback. I’ll be glad to provide corrections and adjustments.
In any case, it would be difficult for anyone to prove that the “benefits” of FATCA outweigh the global costs. What is shown here, is that FATCA costs more than 10 times what it was said to take in.
What we do know, is that FATCA is one big loser.
Forty minutes of more FATCA education for every *Government Abroad* (outside the USA)…
And, our Canadian government representatives – whichever stripe (past Conservatives or present Liberals), you haven’t been listening or comprehending. You have been and remain to be negligent on behalf of *US Person* Canadians as well as all Canadians.
Jim Jatras reminds us — and many here at Brock have certainly provided information from the December 15, 2012 video below to our Canadian government representatives,
Frankly, this would have been a helluva lot easier a few years ago (there’s not much I said in this new video I didn’t say in 2012…
…but the chickens keep roosting with no push-back.
