As we’ve reported previously, since around 2006 or so there have been dozens of newspaper reports and many more internet comments about people who renounced U.S. citizenship but never showed up in the Federal Register. However, the Federal Register is not supposed to include just ex-citizens, but certain ex-permanent residents as well: those who held their green cards for eight out of the past fifteen years.
Up until now, the only ex-green card holders I’d heard of weren’t within the scope of the “name-and-shame list”, either because they’d given up their green cards before the list existed (like Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou) or didn’t hold them for long enough (e.g. Constitutional Court judge Chen Be-yue). However, in early 2010, Korea.com reported that 2PM member Ok Taec-yeon had given up a long-held U.S. green card so that he could serve in the South Korean army.
Another Korean-language report states that Ok, who was born in Busan, immigrated to Massachusetts with his family at age 12, which would be some time around 2000; it also has a picture of an old yearbook confirming that “Ok Taec-yeon” is his real name and the same spelling he’s been using all his life, so there’s not much possibility he slipped through in the Federal Register list under a different name — no one surnamed “Ok” has ever appeared in the “name-and-shame list”.
