Americans Renouncing Citizenship Over High Taxes

[American Patriot]

Record Number of Americans Giving Up Citizenship

August 12, 2013
Nicki economics citizenship, economics, Fatca, taxes 1 Comment
My parents brought me here from the former Soviet Union when I was just 8 years old. At the time I didn’t really understand why I was here, why we left and why my parents were so happy to have arrived in America.


I learned eventually.


Even though I didn’t rationally understand what this nation was about, and what the nation I escaped was, the raw thoughts were there, and they formed into ideas gradually.


I never thought in a million years of leaving the country my parents fought so hard to enter – or the citizenship they worked so hard to attain. I have always been proud of my American citizenship. I joined the military, because I love this country. I serve, protect and defend the Constitution of these United States for those same reasons to this day.


I cannot imagine what these expats are thinking or feeling. But I’m beginning to understand why.

Globally, more U.S. citizens have renounced their citizenship in the first and second quarters than all of 2012 combined, and 2013 is already on track to becoming a record year for renunciations. A total of 1,130 names appeared on the latest list of renunciations from the Internal Revenue Service, according to Andrew Mitchel, a tax lawyer who tracks the data. That is far above the previous high of 679, set in the first quarter, and more than were reported in all of 2012.
While those numbers are still a fraction of the estimated six million Americans living abroad, lawyers say the main trigger for cutting ties with U.S. recently is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, which requires foreign institutions to disclose the overseas assets of U.S. green-card holders and citizens to the U.S. government.

These people are being harassed and targeted by their own government. “My decision was less about the actual amount of taxes I had to pay, and more about the system,” said one investment banker, who renounced his U.S. citizenship and is now a Hong Kong citizen. “I’m not an ultrawealthy dude. It was the hassle with all the paperwork”
Why?


Because somehow our government feels like it hasn’t sucked enough blood, sweat and tears from its citizens. Because somehow, it wants more. Because somehow, it’s never enough.


Not all of these people are ultra-rich, trying to avoid paying taxes. The US is the only nation in the OECD that taxes citizens no matter where they reside. So these American citizens wind up paying for infrastructure they don’t use, government services they don’t need and funding programs for people with whom they do not live, because many of them have been living outside the United States for years. And they will have to pay that money to the IRS – with penalties and interest.


And then there’s the forms and inevitable bureaucracy, which requires foreign banking institutions to get information on US citizens who happen to have accounts with them and hand it over to the IRS.
The result?

Many Americans residing overseas are reporting banking lock-out. Many foreign financial institutions have simply chosen to eliminate their US citizens and US person client basis in order to minimize their exposure to FATCA reporting requirements, withholding fees and potential penalties.

This is the result – again – of a government that is out of control. This is politicians laying claim to your earnings – no matter where you might reside. This is elected scum thinking it’s entitled to your work and your achievements.


You don’t believe me? Listen to Keith Ellison, who thinks the government has a RIGHT to yet more of your money! Ellison, a Prognazi Marxist representative from Minnesota, says there’s no problem! There’s plenty of money! It’s just the government doesn’t have it!


What Keith Ellison and leeches like him do not understand is that the government is individuals elected by the people. The government is representatives who get their power and authority from the people who elect them. There is no “government right.” Rights belong to individuals, not to an entity called the government, and NO individual has the right to steal another individual’s earnings at the point of a gun!


Government is power.


Government is guns.


We delegate certain rights to the government, such as defense. We have the right to self defense, and we have the right to delegate that authority to our government on a larger scale. That right still belongs to each individual. We do not cede it by delegating it. We simply give the government the authority to act on our behalf.
It is a service, and we pay taxes for that service as a society.


But when that government uses its guns (or the threat of arrest) to relieve us of our rights, that’s when things go wrong.


When that government uses its power to create new “rights” while violating existing ones, that’s when things go wrong.


So when leeches like Keith Ellison claim a “right” to our property and our earnings, it’s time to tell them to stop!


It’s not like we don’t pay enough taxes. Federal, state, local, sales, Social Security, Medicare, property taxes, fuel taxes, federal corporate income tax share, estate tax, fees, licenses, inflation losses, inheritance, deficit allowance, gift taxes, etc.


But Keith Ellison thinks we ought to pay more, and he and his progressive cabal in Congress deserve even more, so they can spend it how they see fit, and that they have a better understanding of how your money should be spent than you do. Because it really doesn’t matter, you see, that you did not ask for the “service” Keith Ellison and the rest of the parasites in Washington want to “provide.”


“Services” like soccer fields for the terrorists being kept at Guantanamo Bay, grad students in Indonesia, tattoo removal programs for gang bangers, research on sex habits of Japanese quail and video games, social and environmental programs in China, museums that obviously could not make a profit on their own and required government funding, “artists” who had the same problem, and genital washing research in South Africa.


And now, the politicians in Washington think they have the right to demand even more of your money to fund even more of their stupidity.


Is it an wonder that Americans are leaving in droves, and giving up their citizenship?


It has become quite obvious that their government has become their ruler, not a service. It has become quite obvious that the deadbeats in Washington that produce nothing have no respect for the hard work and the earnings of the people who elected them.


So they are leaving.


I haven’t given up on this country yet. But I do think that people need to understand that their votes have consequences, and putting freeloaders in power year after year has consequences.


When the rich whom they victimize, and whose bones they pick clean have no more left to give, and those who have had enough have left the country, they will turn to what we now consider the “middle class” as the new “rich” whom they can suck dry. And when the “middle class” becomes indigent, and every producer has either lost everything or left the country, whom will they have left to loot?

[American Patriot]

In the America that I grew up in, and at least five generations prior to me even being born lived since before the Revolutionary War, you were born, you made it to adulthood, you moved out, you worked, you either became successful or you didn’t. If you didn’t you wound up living on the streets or died, or both.

If you succeeded you at least could pay your bills, raise your own family and didn’t demand others “take care of you”.

That America is gone. We’re staring down the barrel of the same gun that killed the Roman Empire. We have a decline in ethics, morals, family values. We are seeing government and political corruption on a scale never before seen in the USA. We’re seeing a shaky and unstable economy that is running headlong into collapse. We have a “President” (and I use that term loosely) that is working to divide this country into haves and have-nots, and racially rip the country down the middle. We have a Leftist/Progressive generation who grew up here that wants to turn this country into the Old Soviet Union – to take our guns, our defense from the government, to politicize every point they can, to undermine the morality of this country, to work aggressively to bring forth the most “Progressive” form of government (read: Communist) to ever exist. We have Agencies within the government that are no longer supervised, no longer being watch-dogged, and Congress has given them the power to destroy what we have.

I personally can’t blame one American who is fed up and figured out it’s time to go. In the Revolutionary War there were the “Loyalists” who left and formed another country on an island. But I fought for this country. I believe in the Constitution, and I believe in the Idealism that is America. I won’t ALLOW myself to be dragged into a “give up your citizenship” drive, but will rather FORCE them to take it from me, with a fight.

I’m getting too old for this crap though. I’ve chosen a different path. The path of “travel” until things “get better” to save my wife from the coming destruction of this nation. I won’t sit on my ass and watch. I blog, I prod, I still write letters to Congress, I still vote, and I still have my guns and won’t give them up. To hell with the Progressive Left that wants them – no, I will die defending the rights of Americans, even those that want to give them up and take mine.

But I also won’t any longer sit still and allow the collection of money from my income that goes to losers, Obamaphones, Obamacare, and Obama-this-and-that. My money I worked so hard for for these last four decades is MINE. I will keep it, and I will use it. If they take it, so be it, I’ll keep going but there will be hell to pay. Because if they take mine, they will take others’ monies and the day will come when one last shove pushes Americans over the edge and they stand up and push back.

That day is almost here.

In the mean time, downsizing, becoming mobile and becoming more fluent in the language of war is all we have left.

[American Patriot]

US TAXPAYERS RENOUNCING CITIZENSHIP IN 2013 BLOWS AWAY ALL RECORDS

Posted on February 10, 2014



Daily Caller: “A record number of U.S. taxpayers renounced their citizenship or green cards in 2013, according to new data. … According to Andrews Mitchel, an international tax attorney who tracks the expatriations at his International Tax Blog, the 2,999 amount represented a 221 percent increase over the 932 total in 2012 — and “shatters” the previous record of 1,781 set in 2011.”

Robert Wood: “Although statistics are not available for why people say a final good-bye, many now find America’s global income tax compliance and disclosure laws inconvenient and nettlesome. Some go so far as to say that the U.S. tax and disclosure laws are downright oppressive.

No group is more severely impacted than U.S. persons living abroad. For those living and working in foreign countries, it is almost a given that they must report and pay tax where they live. But they must also continue to file taxes in the U.S. What’s more, U.S. reporting is based on their worldwide income, even though they are paying taxes in the country where they live.”


Labor participation today is the lowest in four decades. The cost for business to add an employee is enormous, why return to a job when there’s a check coming in the mail?


We explained the fact that the gap between the successful and the remainder has widened during Obama, just the opposite of what was promised. Even so Obama and his liberals continue to sell the same programs, in essence a campaigning against himself.


Someone has to fund the spending and in this case it’s the citizens outside of America who are saying enough is enough. Now, like so many companies, their revenue too is gone.

.


DC: Record total number U.S. taxpayers renounce citizenship in 2013
Robert Woods: Relinquishment and Renunciation Guide

[American Patriot]

Many Americans Renounce Citizenship, Hitting New Record

08 Friday Aug 2014
Posted by ashleycherish in IRS, US News
≈ 2 Comments

Tags
America, Citizenship, expatriation, Taxes, US News


It may seem like a drop in the bucket, especially when droves want to immigrate to America. Still, the newly published names of individuals who renounced their U.S. citizenship or terminated long-term U.S. residency is up, with 576 for the quarter and 1,577 so far this year. The growing trend is a sad one, with record numbers of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship.


For all the immigrant arrivals, the trickle the other direction is becoming more pronounced. The tally was 2,999 for all of 2013, a 221% increase over the 932 who left in 2012. The Treasury Department is required to publish a quarterly list, a kind of public outing putting Americans on notice of who relinquished their rights. Consular expatriations, where people don’t file exit tax forms with the IRS, are apparently not counted.


Indeed, the Treasury Department’s published list states explicitly this is just those about whom the Secretary of the Treasury has data. It means these numbers are under-stated, some say considerably. The presence or absence of tax motivation used to impact how one would be taxed on departing the U.S. Today, it is no longer relevant why someone expatriates.


The law was changed in 2004, so tax consequences do not hinge on why one leaves. But that could change. After Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed permanently for Singapore with his IPO riches, there was an angry backlash. Mr. Saverin’s fly-away prompted such outrage that Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey introduced a bill to double the exit tax to 30% for anyone leaving the U.S. for tax reasons.


Most expatriations are motivated primarily by factors such as family and convenience. Complex or costly taxes can sway a decision but are often only one factor. Many now find America’s global income tax compliance and disclosure laws inconvenient or even oppressive.


Learn more from Forbes

[American Patriot]

OBAMA SAYS BUSINESSES RENOUNCING THEIR CITICENSHIP: US TAX RATE 40% VS CANADA’S 26%

Posted on August 26, 2014



Obama: “But there’s another trend that threatens to undermine the progress you’ve helped make. Even as corporate profits are as high as ever, a small but growing group of big corporations are fleeing the country to get out of paying taxes. They’re keeping most of their business inside the United States, but they’re basically renouncing their citizenship and declaring that they’re based somewhere else, just to avoid paying their fair share.”

WP: “The effective corporate tax rate in the U.S., which combines national, state, and city-level tax rates, is nearly 40 percent—the highest across all 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries. Canada’s, by comparison, is just over 26 percent.”

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WP- Have taxes your way: Why Burger King wants to become a Canadian citizen

http://burstupdates.wordpress.com/20...vs-canadas-26/

[Ryan Ruck]

Exit Strategy: FATCA Tax Law Keeps Pushing Americans To Give Up Citizenship

August 18, 2014

Here’s a hot tip for accountants and tax attorneys: now is a good time to develop specialized expertise in advising clients who may be seeking to expatriate from the United States. That demographic looks more and more like a real growth opportunity.

That’s one potential lesson we can draw from recent years’ explosion of U.S. citizens living and working overseas who are now renouncing their citizenship. In the first six months of 2014, 1,577 Americans decided to expatriate; last year, nearly 3,000 called it quits, a record high number. In the last five years, a total of about 9,000 Americans surrendered their citizenship, according to a survey of federal data compiled by Bloomberg.

Why are so many Americans heading for the exits? Blame it on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a new law targeting Americans who conceal financial holdings in offshore accounts. By requiring foreign financial institutions to provide to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) detailed information on accounts held by U.S. citizens, FATCA was ostensibly intended to curtail tax evasion.

But in reality, the law has been rife with unintended consequences, as foreign banks and financial institutions have begun to decline doing business with American citizens, for fear of falling afoul of U.S. tax authorities. Some U.S. citizens have received notice that their long-standing accounts with overseas financial institutions are being summarily closed.

Unable to open up basic checking and savings accounts, while at the same time facing onerous reporting requirements and penalties, many are making the difficult decision to hand over their U.S. passports.

“It’s not just the super-rich doing it,” David McKeegan of Hong Kong-based Greenback Expat Tax Services says in Forbes. “We’re talking average, middle-class people, people teaching English as a second language and doing freelance jobs making $30,000–50,000 a year, simply because of the fact that they can’t open locked bank accounts.”

Investment advisor David Kuensi of Thun Financial Advisors laid out a detailed brief against FATCA in a July 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed. He describes the law as “an Orwellian tax nightmare” for U.S. citizens living and working overseas.

“The vast majority of U.S. expatriates living abroad harbor a strong sense of patriotism that includes a willingness to shoulder their fair share of the nation’s tax burden,” Kuenzi writes. “Deep resentment arises, however, when they confront the byzantine complexity of preparing a tax return that includes non-U.S. income and non-U.S. financial accounts. FATCA demands rigorous compliance with arcane rules that the IRS has until now never even attempted to enforce on a widespread basis. For Americans abroad, desperately trying to comply, the outcome to family finances is often disastrous.”

A Case Study in Poor Tax Policy

FATCA, passed in 2010 but only taking effect on July 1 after numerous launch delays, has emerged as a case study in poor tax policy. As is par for the course in today’s Washington, the law was enacted with little debate or attention to detail, and with little thought given to how it would work.

As a result, the implementation has been shoddy, marked by serial delays, technological glitches and changes of course. And FATCA’s targets haven’t been wealthy scofflaws, as promised, so much as Americans living and working overseas, who are now caught up in a global dragnet of arbitrary enforcement, onerous reporting requirements and endless complexity.

This year alone, the IRS has announced it would delay enforcement for financial institutions that make a “good faith effort” to comply and relaxed some penalties against individual taxpayers. But these ad hoc revisions, apparently intended to provide financial institutions and taxpayers some breathing room, seem to only be fueling further uncertainty and anxiety, since they make enforcement increasingly subjective.

It’s not as if the Treasury Department has only suddenly become aware of the troubles the law poses for ordinary taxpayers. In a report issued at the beginning of the year, the IRS Office of the Taxpayer Advocate listed FATCA implementation among the agency’s “Most Serious Problems.” They noted that poor design and implementation mean the law has the “potential to be burdensome, overly broad and detrimental to taxpayer rights.”

Sparking a Revolt

Meanwhile, the revolt against FATCA’s intrusions continues to grow. Members of Congress and legal experts raise critical questions about the IRS’s authority to forge and implement intergovernmental agreements for the law’s enforcement. North of the border, a group of Canadian citizens affected by the law have filed suit in federal court charging that their country’s agreement with the IRS to hand over FATCA information is unconstitutional.

And according to a recent poll by the financial advisory firm De Vere International, nearly 80% of Americans living and working overseas are considering giving up their U.S. citizenship, thanks to the climate of mistrust engendered by FATCA.

"Some told us that they felt they were now under suspicion by the IRS, even though there was no question of any wrongdoing or having any taxes owing,” De Vere CEO Nigel Green says.

[Ryan Ruck]

More Americans Renounce Citizenship, With 2014 on Pace for a Record

October 24, 2014

Significant numbers of people are continuing to renounce their U.S. citizenship or end their long-term U.S. residency.

There are 776 names on the Treasury Department list published Friday for the third quarter of 2014.

That’s the third highest quarterly figure ever, according to Andrew Mitchel, an international tax lawyer in Centerbrook, Conn., who tracks the data. The total number of published renouncers so far in 2014 is 2,353, putting this year on pace to exceed last year’s record total of 2,999, adds Mr. Mitchel.

The Treasury Department is required by law to publish a list of the names of people who renounce quarterly. The list doesn’t indicate when people did so or why. It also doesn’t distinguish between people giving up passports and those turning in green cards, or indicate what other nationality the individuals hold.

Experts say that the growing number of renunciations by U.S. citizens and permanent residents is linked to a five-year enforcement campaign against U.S. taxpayers who have undeclared offshore accounts. The campaign began after Swiss banking giant UBS admitted in 2009 that it had systematically encouraged U.S. taxpayers to hide assets in secret Swiss accounts.

About 100 other Swiss financial institutions are currently in a U.S. Justice Department program designed to uncover other secret accounts. Recently, attorneys representing 73 of them protested that the terms of the program were too harsh.

Unlike other developed nations, the U.S. taxes citizens on income they earn anywhere in the world. The rule dates to the Civil War. U.S. tax liabilities can also cover children born to Americans abroad, extending the reach of the Internal Revenue Service across generations as well as oceans. There are only partial offsets for double taxation for people who owe taxes both to the U.S. and a foreign country, and the reporting rules are onerous, experts say.

For decades these laws were rarely enforced. Now, scrutiny of Americans abroad is intensifying because of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, which Congress passed in 2010. The law’s main provisions, which took effect in July, will require foreign financial institutions to report income of their U.S. customers to the IRS.

[vector7]

Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Obama Bypasses Congress to Foist “Imperialist” Tax Plot on World

As part of a fiendish effort known as FATCA supposedly aimed at extracting an extra billion or so dollars from U.S. taxpayers each year, the Obama administration is bypassing Congress to impose a far-reaching new tax regime on the world, and domestically on the United States. Experts and analysts say the scheme could destabilize the U.S. financial system and potentially even spark another economic crisis due partly to executive-branch mandates on American banks; yet the IRS and the U.S. Treasury are moving full-speed ahead in spite of major concerns raised by lawmakers and others over their authority to do so. Critics are referring to the whole plot as “fiscal imperialism.”

Among other schemes, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA for short, seeks to coerce financial institutions and governments all over the world into becoming de facto extensions of the IRS. It will also turn U.S. banks and the IRS into agents of foreign tax collectors if the administration gets its way. Passed by Democrats and signed by Obama in 2010 as part of an unrelated “jobs” bill, enforcement of the vast and unimaginably complex taxation scheme has been delayed several times. It is set to go into effect this summer, but experts and policymakers are warning of a broad array of potentially devastating consequences.

The most serious concerns expressed thus far include the potential for massive damage to the U.S. economy; destabilization of American banks; an end to financial privacy and constitutional protections; the emergence of a truly global taxation regime under international institutions such as the OECD; potentially hundreds of billions in compliance costs according to some estimates; a growing wave of U.S. citizens forced to renounce their citizenship; and much more. However, because foreign governments want an incentive to cooperate with the controversial FATCA regime — and many have laws protecting privacy and human rights that must be violated to comply — the Obama administration has a big problem, too.

“We see no principled basis on which to require that financial institutions based in other countries collect and provide us with information on U.S. taxpayers, if we take the position that our own institutions should be exempt from similar requirements,” explained Treasury Acting Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Emily McMahon in a 2012 speech. “To the contrary, we believe that it will be critical to the success of our efforts to implement FATCA that we are able to reciprocate.”

The proposed “solution,” in other words, is for the Obama administration to provide foreign governments with the same information on foreign citizens that Washington, D.C., hopes to extract from other jurisdictions and institutions on “U.S. persons.” Then comes the next problem: The U.S. Treasury does not have the statutory or constitutional authority to do that, according to lawmakers, legal experts, and even the administration itself.

Still, it appears that the administration is going ahead with the plot anyway, creating new IRS “regulations” and pseudo-treaties with foreign governments — none of which will be presented to the U.S. Senate for ratification, which the Constitution demands — purporting to grant the Treasury powers it claims to need. Despite its unconstitutional promises to foreign regimes, though, even the Obama administration has essentially acknowledged that it currently has no lawful power to share such information, or “reciprocate,” as the agreements put it.

“In many cases, foreign law would prevent foreign financial institutions from complying with the FATCA provisions ... by reporting to the IRS information about U.S. accounts,” the administration acknowledged in its Analytical Perspectives to the 2014 Budget asking Congress for legislation to grant the administration even more power. “Such legal impediments can be addressed through intergovernmental agreements under which the foreign government agrees to provide information required by FATCA to the IRS.”

As The New American has reported, in order to comply with Washington’s extraterritorial tax demands for information on citizens and green-card holders, multiple governments are being forced to gut, abolish, or override their longstanding legal protections of privacy and human rights. In some countries, such as New Zealand and others, even anti-discrimination laws must be undone to permit compliance with FATCA by authorities and financial institutions in those jurisdictions.

In Canada, following Ottawa’s decision to sign an “intergovernmental agreement,” or IGA, with the Obama administration, the outrage over the threat to fundamental rights is still boiling. “Although it contains certain exemptions, the agreement negotiated by [Finance] Minister Flaherty fails to address the most significant threats that FATCA poses to Canadian privacy and human rights,” complained Elizabeth May, a Member of Parliament and leader of the Green Party of Canada. She said it also likely violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Citizens are working on legal challenges, too.

None of that, however, seems to matter to the administration and its legions of so-called “FATCAnatics,” as critics refer to the zealous officials determined to impose the scheme at all costs. Now, amid non-stop mega-scandals and investigations swirling around the IRS, the administration is asking for Congress to hand it even more power — and perhaps to legalize elements of what it is already doing on its own.

“Requiring U.S. financial institutions to report similar information to the IRS with respect to nonresident accounts would facilitate such intergovernmental cooperation by enabling the IRS to reciprocate,” the administration’s request continues, similar to the language used in Obama’s more recent proposed 2015 budget. “The proposal would provide the Secretary of the Treasury with authority to prescribe regulations that would require reporting of information with respect to” foreigners living abroad, foreign companies, and U.S. firms owned partly by foreigners. Among the data sought: account balances, payment details, and more.

So far, Congress has not acted on the administration’s request to grant that power. In fact, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are already growing weary, and wary, of FATCA — and it does not officially go into effect until July. The Republican National Committee this year adopted a strongly worded resolution calling for repeal of the draconian addition to the U.S. tax regime. Even top Democrats have openly asked that FATCA-related regulations issued by the administration, considered crucial to implementing the scheme, be permanently withdrawn.

Rather than wait for Congress, however, the administration has simply promulgated far-reaching IRS “regulations” purporting to force U.S. financial institutions to report account holders while negotiating the unconstitutional pseudo-treaties with foreign governments. The first reports on non-resident U.S. accounts were due last week under the widely criticized IRS “regulation,” and the Obama administration has already signed “intergovernmental agreements” with some two dozen foreign governments. Another was being negotiated with Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia.

Of course, there is no mention of “inter-governmental agreements” (IGAs) or allowing so-called “reciprocity” in the actual statute that contains FATCA. There is also no authority to order domestic banks to collect and share information on all foreign account holders on behalf of foreign governments. The New American offered the Treasury Department multiple opportunities to explain what purported authority — statutory, constitutional, or regulatory — it believes it has to compel U.S. financial institutions to collect and share the information. TNA also asked about the supposed authority for IGAs.

No real answer was ever provided. Essentially, though, the Treasury pointed to existing tax treaties ratified by the Senate that the U.S. government has signed with other governments as its justification. However, those treaties generally deal with specific, individual requests made by authorities in other jurisdictions; not the wholesale NSA-style vacuuming up and transfer of all private financial data without so much as probable cause, a warrant, or even suspicion of wrongdoing, as envisioned in the IGAs and other FATCA-related schemes. None of the blanket domestic authority is contained in those treaties, either.

Lawmakers have been trying unsuccessfully to get answers about it all. “I further note that the IGAs that are being entered into are not authorized, or even mentioned, in FACTA,” explained Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) in a 2013 letter to Treasury boss Jack Lew. “Despite the absence of any specific legislative authorization, these IGAs are not being submitted to the Senate as treaties or treaty amendments for its advice and consent.”

Separately, the congressman pointed out, other than in its Analytical Perspectives document, the administration had not even asked Congress for authority to implement the controversial agreements with foreign governments. “If such authority exists, please provide a citation to the specific relevant statute,” Posey said, adding that FATCA should be either repealed or drastically amended while calling for a moratorium on the scheme and the negotiation of IGAs.

According to a spokesperson for the congressman, the Treasury has not replied to the letter nor offered any hint about where its purported authority to proceed might come from. “We dispute whether the Treasury has the authority to implement these regulations and agreements; and they aren’t treaties because the Senate does not ratify them,” Posey spokesman George Cecala told The New American.

“We think that these agreements are treaties and need to be submitted to the Senate for ratification,” he continued. “We do not believe FATCA gives them the authority to do this — FATCA does not state that. America’s elected representatives need to make these major changes. This is shifting decision making to unelected bureaucracies, and such important decisions should be made by the people’s elected representatives.”

It is all part of a broader trend, too. “The administration has established a track record of bypassing Congress and issuing regulations when they want to,” Cecala said, citing endless executive re-writes of ObamaCare and other examples of the president either defying or ignoring lawmakers. “The fact that they are now asking Congress for this authority suggests they don’t have it, and we don’t think they do.”

As to the wisdom of the dragnet-style approach to gathering and sharing sensitive information on everyone, Cecala explained that the U.S. government already has tools to locate criminals. “If the Treasury Department suspects criminal activity, they can send an enforcement order,” he said. “What they are asking for is blanket authority to collect all data, centralize it, and then share it with other governments.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who introduced legislation aimed at reining in the scheme, has also spoken out about the administration’s abuses. “FATCA's harmful impacts cover the spectrum,” he said, blasting “hundreds of billions” in compliance costs to the U.S. economy alone. “It is a violation of Americans' constitutional protections, oversteps the limits of Executive power, disregards the mutual respect of sovereignty among nations and drains money from the federal treasury under the guise of replenishing it, and discourages overseas investment in the United States.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have also lashed out against the IRS “regulation” mandating the reporting of foreign-owned accounts, saying, among other major concerns, that it “flagrantly violates the intent of Congress.” In a letter to Obama asking him to “permanently withdraw” the scheme, signed by every member of the Florida delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives including Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the lawmakers said: “We feel the IRS is abusing its regulatory authority and doing so in a manner that is contrary to congressional intent.”

Tax law experts have also questioned the administration’s purported authority to proceed as it has — and warned of serious implications. Allison Christians, the H. Heward Stikeman Chair in Tax Law with McGill University’s Faculty of Law, noted in a 2013 paper that the FATCA statute “made no mention of any internationally-agreed alternative to its enforcement, and Congress has made no authorization since then for the president to override FATCA’s statutory provisions by international agreement.”

However, because of “difficulties” in foisting FATCA on the world, the Treasury began creating IGAs, which purport to promise domestic action that may not be possible. Professor Christians concluded that the “legal pedigree” of the agreements “is tenuous as a constitutional matter” and they “violate the rule of law by ignoring established procedural requirements for binding the U.S. internationally.” The consequences could be serious on multiple fronts.

“This undermines the legal system in the U.S. domestically as well as hurting U.S. credibility in the international community,” the tax-law expert said. “Instead of jeopardizing the important and complex project of global tax compliance with such a legally dubious procedure, the obvious and straightforward approach to making FATCA work internationally is to follow the normal treaty-making procedure, time-tested through 100 years of U.S. tax treaty-making history.”

Right now, the issue of IRS mandates forcing U.S. banks to report accounts is in federal appeals court, where industry associations from Florida and Texas are suing to stop the radical decree that has been lambasted by top Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Questions about the legality of the IGA pseudo-treaties and the ability of the Treasury to deliver on its “commitments” to foreign governments, meanwhile, are growing louder every day as awareness spreads.

The fate of requests to Congress from the administration for even broader authority to gather and share more sensitive information remains uncertain. “As [Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Policy] Robert Stack of Treasury confirmed to me in person, regulations to impose domestic reciprocal reporting cannot be promulgated without new statutory authority,” former U.S. diplomat and Senate staffer James Jatras, an attorney who runs RepealFATCA.com, told The New American. “Chances of getting that through the House are virtually nil — even more so if the Senate flips.”

The domestic information gathering and international sharing component of FATCA — referred to by some analysts as DATCA — represents the “Achilles heel” of the whole ploy, Jatras said. “FATCA and the OECD scheme could end up like the League of Nations: a dead letter because the United States, which got the ball rolling, opted out,” he added. Multiple analysts have also suggested recently that the demise of DATCA could kill the Socialist-backed OECD plan, admittedly modeled on FATCA, for a global tax regime.

For much more on FATCA and related schemes, see the articles linked below.

Related articles:

Obama Tax Scheme Could Destabilize Banks, Spark Economic Crisis

Globalists Unveil Socialist-backed New World Tax Regime

Obama IRS to Share Private Financial Data With Russia’s Putin

New U.S. Tax Regime is "Devastating," Experts Say

Republican Party Votes to Repeal “Punitive” New FATCA Tax Regime

New U.S. Tax Regime Trampling Rights in New Zealand and Beyond

Globalists Exploit New U.S. Tax Law for World Taxation Regime

Amid IRS Abuse, Record Number of Americans Give Up U.S. Citizenship

Swiss Banks Are Now Agents for the IRS

IRS Makes Americans International Pariahs

White House Boasts of Obama Power Grabs as Congress Funds Them

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...-plot-on-world

[vector7]

Wednesday, 21 January 2015
Obama IRS Shares Private Financial Data With Foreign Tyrants

To comply with unconstitutional pseudo-treaties negotiated by the Obama administration without the consent of Congress or any semblance of constitutional authority, the IRS announced that it will be sharing private financial information on U.S. bank account holders with foreign powers. No warrant is needed for foreign governments or tyrants to peruse the sensitive information at will — including brutal communist regimes and possibly even criminals or hackers. The embattled federal tax agency announced the controversial move in a press release last week. But the latest data-sharing scheme, while troublesome to critics and lawmakers, is merely one important part of a much broader global taxation regime now being quietly imposed on humanity by the White House and its radical allies around the world. Obama’s lawless “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act” (FATCA) is the model for it all.

Under the new data-exchange scheme unveiled by the Internal Revenue Service last week, any foreign government that has signed an unconstitutional “Intergovernmental Agreement” (IGA) with the Obama administration has automatic access to the private financial data of its residents with U.S. accounts or assets, including Americans. No warrant or even suspicion of wrongdoing is required, crushing the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution while upending centuries of Western legal protections for the right to privacy. Of course, the FATCA statute underpinning the whole privacy-shredding scheme provided no authority to the IRS to even collect that information from banks — much less to share it with foreign governments and potentially dangerous dictators.

As with numerous other Obama schemes, however, the White House has taken the liberty to lawlessly rewrite provisions and usurp draconian new powers — in this case part of a supposed quest to extract an extra $1 billion per year from U.S. taxpayers. Under the emerging FATCA regime and Obama’s “executive actions” that have modified and expanded it, foreign banks and governments must report all of the private financial data on U.S. citizens and permanent residents to the IRS. If financial institutions or foreign nations refuse to become unpaid agents in Obama’s war on privacy, they can essentially be shut out of U.S. markets entirely. But to get foreign governments to help enforce FATCA, there needed to be a carrot — something Congress did not include in the actual statute, but that Obama and the IRS knew would be needed.

So, in exchange for help from foreign rulers to wage war on the privacy rights of Americans protected under the Fourth Amendment, the White House, which helped ram FATCA through the Democrat-controlled Congress under an unrelated “jobs bill,” decreed various carrots into existence without permission. That is where the new IRS system comes in. Dubbed the “International Data Exchange Service” (IDES) by Obama’s scandal-plagued tax agency, the IRS system will be used by foreign governments and financial institutions to “securely send their information reports on financial accounts held by U.S. persons to the IRS under … FATCA or pursuant to the terms of an intergovernmental agreement (IGA).” But it’s more than that.

That same system that conscripts virtually every foreign government and major financial institution into Obama’s war on privacy and the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans will also be used to share data from American accounts with foreign tax agencies. “Where a jurisdiction has a reciprocal IGA and the jurisdiction has the necessary safeguards and infrastructure in place, the IRS will also use IDES to provide similar information to the host country tax authority on accounts in U.S. financial institutions held by the jurisdiction’s residents,” the IRS explained in its press release. In other words, if a foreign government signed an unconstitutional pseudo-treaty with the Obama administration, they get help from the U.S. federal government to shred privacy rights as well — including the privacy rights of Americans living or born overseas, as well as their own citizens or subjects.

On the IRS list of foreign governments that will soon be able to access (and potentially abuse) the private financial information of their subjects and even some Americans are many of the most murderous and corrupt regimes on Earth. From brutal Islamist autocracies that behead converts to Christianity to ruthless communist regimes that treat their peoples like slaves, it seems every government is getting on board the bandwagon. The regimes ruling Communist China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Belarus, Haiti, Indonesia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Nicaragua, Brazil, South Africa, Qatar, Moldova, and many more — well over 100 in total so far — will soon have full access to the data under the pseudo-treaties with Obama. Eventually, others will as well.

The Communist Party dictatorship controlling mainland China, which has murdered more people than any entity in human history, cheered Obama’s scheming and is now plotting to extract wealth from its victims no matter where in the world they live, too — using the same global tax system that the White House and its allies are building. That is bad news for dissidents, refugees, and others, along with their families and friends. Other governments and tyrants are expected to follow suit in demanding tribute from around the world. And with the emerging Obama-inspired planetary taxation regime, putting it all into practice and enforcing it will become relatively easy.

Of course, the IRS tried to put a happy face on its new data-sharing, privacy-shredding scheme, which critics have blasted for attacking the Fourth Amendment and crushing every last vestige of financial privacy worldwide. “The opening of the International Data Exchange Service is a milestone in the implementation of FATCA,” boasted IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, whose tenure has come under fire as non-stop and growing scandals continue to plague the agency. “With it, comes the start of a secure system of automated, standardized information exchanges among government tax authorities. This will enhance our ability to detect hidden accounts and help ensure fairness in the tax system.”

As The New American has documented extensively, trying to force foreign banks to serve as unpaid extensions of the IRS has, of course, made Americans into pariahs around the world. The FATCA scheme has made life miserable — if not impossible — for millions of Americans abroad; even major foreign banks have decided to sever all business relationships with U.S. citizens rather than comply with unimaginably complex regulations and reporting requirements being lawlessly erected by the Obama IRS. Middle- and lower-class Americans overseas who cannot hire armies of attorneys and accountants have been especially hard hit, with more and more thousands tragically opting to surrender their U.S. citizenship every year to escape the crushing burden.

However, it gets even worse, and Americans will not be the only ones whose rights are shredded. As The New American has documented extensively, globalists and socialists are quickly working to turn FATCA into the basis for a truly global taxation regime long sought by the establishment and tyrannical forces such as Socialist International. Already, the cartel of governments behind the G20 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are working to impose their global version of FATCA — dubbed GATCA by critics — on all of humanity. Brutal dictators and Big Government politicians around the world have been dreaming about just such a scheme for decades. And now, thanks to Obama and FATCA, it may become a reality, at least if the opposition fails in the ongoing effort to stop it.

Still, there is still hope that FATCA will ultimately be crushed and financial privacy restored before its tentacles become too strong. As The New American reported in a series of articles last year, virtually the entire global tax regime sought by the Obama administration and its allies is built on a foundation of lawlessness and unconstitutional decrees. That will make it much easier to bring down. A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of numerous FATCA-related schemes and decrees may result in federal courts declaring it unconstitutional. Separately, the GOP and many Republican lawmakers, now in the majority, have officially expressed their opposition to FATCA and say they are planning various legislative assaults on it. Whether the global tax cartel or liberty and the Constitution will win in the end, though, depends largely on the American people.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at
anewman@thenewamerican.com
http://www.thenewamerican.com/econom...oreign-tyrants

[Ryan Ruck]

Americans Abroad Renounce Their U.S. Citizenship At Record Rate

May 8, 2015

Americans living abroad renounced their U.S. citizenship at a record rate in the first part of this year, Bloomberg News reports.

Whether to unhinge themselves from U.S. laws that call for taxing citizens no matter what country they’re living in, or to be free of more recent complex reporting and tax requirements, some 1,335 one-time Americans bid adios, adieu or ciao to their U.S. citizenship, according to Bloomberg.

The U.S., or more specifically, the Internal Revenue Service, does not look kindly upon those who toss away their U.S. passport. Not only did it increase the fee for doing so a couple of years ago – from $450 to $2,350 – the agency also puts out what some call a “Wall of Shame,” or a publicly available list of each and every person who abandons citizenship.

The agency says it is simply complying with regulations that call for it to announce the identity of every American-no-longer-wannabe. It also attributed the hefty fine increase to the higher demand in processing paperwork.

In all of 2014, slightly more than 3,400 Americans renounced their citizenship, Bloomberg said.

The number of Americans who live overseas is around 6 million.

“The cost of compliance with the complex tax treatment of non-resident U.S. citizens and the potential penalties I face for incorrect filings and for holding non-U.S. securities forces me to consider whether it would be more advantageous to give up my U.S. citizenship,” Bloomberg quoted Stephanos Orestis, a U.S. citizen living in Oslo, as having written in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee. “The thought of doing so is highly distressing for me since I am a born and bred American with a love for my country.”

The United States is the sole nation among the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes its citizens no matter what country they live in.

Among more prominent people who have given up their citizenship in recent years are London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was born in New York and fought with the IRS over taxes, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who was born in Brazil but had become a naturalized citizen.

[Ryan Ruck]

Americans Abroad Renounce Their U.S. Citizenship At Record Rate

May 8, 2015

Americans living abroad renounced their U.S. citizenship at a record rate in the first part of this year, Bloomberg News reports.

Whether to unhinge themselves from U.S. laws that call for taxing citizens no matter what country they’re living in, or to be free of more recent complex reporting and tax requirements, some 1,335 one-time Americans bid adios, adieu or ciao to their U.S. citizenship, according to Bloomberg.

The U.S., or more specifically, the Internal Revenue Service, does not look kindly upon those who toss away their U.S. passport. Not only did it increase the fee for doing so a couple of years ago – from $450 to $2,350 – the agency also puts out what some call a “Wall of Shame,” or a publicly available list of each and every person who abandons citizenship.

The agency says it is simply complying with regulations that call for it to announce the identity of every American-no-longer-wannabe. It also attributed the hefty fine increase to the higher demand in processing paperwork.

In all of 2014, slightly more than 3,400 Americans renounced their citizenship, Bloomberg said.

The number of Americans who live overseas is around 6 million.

“The cost of compliance with the complex tax treatment of non-resident U.S. citizens and the potential penalties I face for incorrect filings and for holding non-U.S. securities forces me to consider whether it would be more advantageous to give up my U.S. citizenship,” Bloomberg quoted Stephanos Orestis, a U.S. citizen living in Oslo, as having written in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee. “The thought of doing so is highly distressing for me since I am a born and bred American with a love for my country.”

The United States is the sole nation among the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes its citizens no matter what country they live in.

Among more prominent people who have given up their citizenship in recent years are London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was born in New York and fought with the IRS over taxes, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who was born in Brazil but had become a naturalized citizen.

[American Patriot]

Fuck the IRS. Hard.