Americans Living Abroad: FAT CATS or FATCA CATS?

In a recent French Property Insider, we spoke about FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act — how currency brokers and financial institutions must adhere to strict rules imposed by the U.S. government and how this has hindered the fluidity of finance across borders, as well as placing Americans on the ‘black list’ of bad customers with these foreign institutions.

Democrats Abroad has been working since 2011 to reform FATCA. FATCA was passed in 2010 as part of the HIRE ACT to bring an end to illegal tax avoidance by Americans in the U.S. using offshore accounts to hide taxable earnings from the IRS. The law, however, has clearly burdened Americans living abroad and their financial service providers by requiring reporting obligations that have made Americans undesirable as customers to many banks and brokerage houses.

Discussions of the the impacts of this important piece of anti-tax evasion legislation with Congress, IRS and U.S. Treasury have been ongoing outlining their recommended reforms to the regulations implementing the law. They are hoping that the regulations can be changed to relieve Americans living abroad and their banks from the obligation to report on the ordinary, every-day accounts they keep in their country of residence.

See “Same Country Exception” for a full explanation.

Just this week, Democrats Abroad issued a letter to members asking them to complete an anonymous survey in order to learn more about the consequences for Americans living around the world and collect demographic information and experiences related to FATCA and banking, employment and tax reporting.

To those of you living outside of the U.S., we strongly urge you to both take the survey and to distribute it as widely as possible among your networks of overseas Americans. Please send the survey link out to your personal and social networks to help us ensure that this survey reaches as many Americans living outside the U.S. as possible: surveymonkey.com/s/DA_FATCA.

If you have any questions, you may contact the Democrats Abroad FBAR/FATCA Task Force at any time: [email protected]. And you can follow developments in their advocacy work to Reform FATCA on the FBAR/FATCA page of the Democrats Abroad Web site.

And even if you’re not a Democrat, but don’t agree with the FATCA laws, do yourself and all of us a favor by taking the survey and learning more about our rights as citizens living abroad.

A bientôt,

Adrian Leeds

Editor, French Property Insider & Director of The Adrian Leeds Group, LLC

(An American Living Abroad)

Email: [email protected]

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