Sunday, October 26, 2014
1%ers giving up passports rather than pay taxes.
And the numbers, still relatively small has increased since last year.
The number of Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship increased 39 percent in the three months through September after rules that make it harder to hide assets from tax authorities came into force.There is a certain boorishness in those preferring to take the money and run rather than support the country that made them wealthy. May they find their kind of happiness in their new countries.
People giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies increased to 776 in the third quarter, from 560 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register data published yesterday.
Tougher asset-disclosure rules that started July 1 under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, prompted more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas to give up their passports. The appeal of U.S. citizenship for expatriates faded further as more than 100 Swiss banks began to turn over data on American clients to avoid prosecution for helping tax evaders.
The U.S., the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nation that taxes citizens wherever they reside, stepped up the search for tax dodgers after UBS AG (UBSN) paid a $780 million penalty in 2009 and handed over data on about 4,700 accounts. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and with Fatca starting, more than 9,000 Americans living overseas gave up their passports over the past five years...
So far, 2,353 Americans have renounced their citizenship this year, close to the all-time high of 2,369 in the first nine months of 2013.
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Most expatriates are not 1%'ers. Most are either retirees living off the sale of their US home plus Social Security, or they are technical specialists who receive good money by American standards but are not millionaires. I know a couple of the latter. One of them lives in Shanghai and is a troubleshooter for American companies that come into China, he's the hired gun they send in to oversee the factories where their stuff is being built. He makes a six figure salary but it doesn't hit the top half of that range. He hasn't been back to the United States in twenty years. Another guy, he lives in Moscow and is a network engineer running one of their Internet companies. He again makes a fine bunch of money but not a millionaire. And again he's been there for years and hasn't been back to the US for close to ten years.
So you have people who have lives elsewhere, and now the US is demanding that they pay taxes even though they're not receiving any benefit for those taxes, and the US is threatening banks overseas with seizing their US assets if they don't turn over the bank accounts of US citizens to the IRS. Why *shouldn't* these people become Russian or Chinese citizens and turn in their passports? I mean, they aren't living in the US, they aren't doing business in the US, they're not receiving any benefit from their US citizenship (to the contrary, *nobody* likes Americans anymore, Americans are ignorant, bigoted, rude, and violent), and now you got the IRS going all jihad on them even though they haven't been to the US in years? It seems like a no-brainer to me. The only reason they have US citizenship is because they were born in the US. They don't live here now and the US is trying to penalize them for being US citizens despite the fact they don't live or work in the US, so the only question is why only 2353 expats have turned over their passport this year?
And BTW, once you turn in your US passport and renounce US citizenship, it becomes somewhat difficult to travel to the US. You can only do so for tourism, not for business, unless you are an employee of a multi-national corporation that can bring you in under a "training and consultation" visa (which is limited to two weeks total). People who turn in their passports have already made the decision that they are not going to re-enter the US ever again except for short periods of time. You don't have to bar them from re-entering the US -- they already made that decision. Which may be why it's only 2369, but so it goes.
- Badtux the Expat-knowin' Penguin
So you have people who have lives elsewhere, and now the US is demanding that they pay taxes even though they're not receiving any benefit for those taxes, and the US is threatening banks overseas with seizing their US assets if they don't turn over the bank accounts of US citizens to the IRS. Why *shouldn't* these people become Russian or Chinese citizens and turn in their passports? I mean, they aren't living in the US, they aren't doing business in the US, they're not receiving any benefit from their US citizenship (to the contrary, *nobody* likes Americans anymore, Americans are ignorant, bigoted, rude, and violent), and now you got the IRS going all jihad on them even though they haven't been to the US in years? It seems like a no-brainer to me. The only reason they have US citizenship is because they were born in the US. They don't live here now and the US is trying to penalize them for being US citizens despite the fact they don't live or work in the US, so the only question is why only 2353 expats have turned over their passport this year?
And BTW, once you turn in your US passport and renounce US citizenship, it becomes somewhat difficult to travel to the US. You can only do so for tourism, not for business, unless you are an employee of a multi-national corporation that can bring you in under a "training and consultation" visa (which is limited to two weeks total). People who turn in their passports have already made the decision that they are not going to re-enter the US ever again except for short periods of time. You don't have to bar them from re-entering the US -- they already made that decision. Which may be why it's only 2369, but so it goes.
- Badtux the Expat-knowin' Penguin
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