Americans Abroad Attacked by Regulations : Citizens Flee Government Over Reach

A once and proud country is now under attack by a once and proud political party, the Democrat party, which finds many of  it's loyal members cast aside for the new agenda that is progressive socialism. The ideology is to gain ultimate power over the population, and to do this it must register and regulate all aspect of life.

Individual freedom must be redefined as ones ability to accommodate the needs and demands of others,  ones self worth and productivity must be restrained as being selfish and arrogant. The agenda description of the progressive socialist liberal democrat party is 'Each according to one needs and each according to ones abilities'.

This is the ultimate goal of the progressive, everyone must not be any better then anyone else, except of course for those welding power. Every time this agenda has been tried it has failed, causing catastrophic destruction. Yet millions in America go willingly to their own demise.

FATCA: Punishing Law-Abiding Americans Living Abroad
Source: Anthony B. Kim and Curtis S. Dubay, "FATCA Hurts Law-Abiding Americans Living Abroad," Heritage Foundation, June 10, 2014.

June 18, 2014

Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010, aiming to reduce tax evasion by making it harder for tax cheats to exploit tax havens, explains Anthony B. Kim, Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, and Research Fellow Curtis S. Dubay. However, Congress seems not to have recognized a side effect of FATCA: it burdens law-abiding Americans living abroad by imposing massive financial and legal costs.

FATCA demands that foreign financial institutions dealing with Americans -- from banks to insurance companies to trusts -- disclose increasingly detailed information about their American clients every year to the IRS. Armed with that information, the IRS becomes the judge of whether wrongful tax evasion has occurred.

But by asking foreign institutions to comply with the United States' incredibly complex tax laws and standards, FATCA places a huge burden on them and subjects non-compliant institutions to financial and legal penalties.  As a result, working with and for American clients is becoming increasingly risky and unprofitable for foreign financial institutions.

• In order to avoid FATCA, some foreign financial companies have begun to deny service to Americans abroad. Some institutions have closed existing accounts of American clients.
• Law-abiding Americans abroad now face difficulties even cashing their paychecks.

Americans living abroad are responding to the tax regime:

• The number of Americans giving up their American citizenship increased by 221 percent between 2012 and 2013.
• Almost 70 percent of Americans living abroad have considered giving up their citizenship, purely due to FATCA.

While Kim and Dubay write that reducing tax evasion is a positive, important objective, the law needs to be reformed, as any progress against tax evasion is coming at massive costs.