FATCA: Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act

Every three months, the state department publishes how many people renounced their citizenship in that quarter. The most recent figure is 1426, which is a new record. To put that into context, in 2008, just 235 people renounced their US citizenship in the whole year. The number has been steadily rising since, with last year […]

The following is an excerpt from ‘An American Tax Nightmare’, published in the New York Times. No one likes tax cheats. They should be pursued and punished wherever they are hiding. But recent efforts by the United States Congress to capture tax revenues on unreported revenues and assets held in foreign accounts are having disastrous […]

Welcome to the era of Big Data. The IRS has rapidly expanded its technology so that at a glance they can track virtually everything you do worldwide. It is no longer prudent for any American living outside the US to base any personal planning, including US tax compliance, on the assumption that the US government […]

An astounding 77,000 banks and financial institutions—even some in Russia—have registered under FATCA—the Foreign Account Tax ComplianceAct. America’s global tax law requires foreign banks to reveal American accounts holding over $50,000. Non-compliant institutions could be frozen out of U.S. markets, so everyone is complying. The fact that 77,000 banks have registered and some 70 countries […]

If you have a bank account anywhere outside the US, starting in 2015, chances are you will receive a letter saying that your bank must hand over the details of any American accounts, including yours. The letters vary with the country and with individual institutions. But the overall message is that the IRS is about […]

For three years now, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has moved to deploy a massive dragnet to stop tax cheats from stashing cash offshore. The crackdown hinges on identifying every account held by every American anywhere in the world, no matter how small. Collect everything to nab and punish relatively few big law breakers. The […]

“FATCA was created in part because of the fear of the United States government that the globalization of finance would give far more people the opportunity to hide their money. It was becoming very clear that it wasn’t going to be just the very wealthy, but that it could really be the middle class and […]

Beware the sledgehammer used to crack the nut. In this case, the nut is the U.S. government’s laudable goal of catching tax evaders. The sledgehammer is the overreaching effect of legislation that is alienating other countries and resulting in millions of U.S. citizens abroad being forced to either painfully reconsider their nationality, or face a […]

A California businessman has pleaded guilty to concealing a foreign bank account at an Israeli bank on his 2007 tax return. Moshe Handelsman of Saratoga, Calif., pleaded guilty Wednesday to filing a false tax return for tax year 2007. According to the plea agreement, between approximately 1993 and 2000, Handelsman, a U.S. citizen, used three […]