American Citizens Abroad has posted an update with information concerning their efforts to replace Citizenship-based Taxation with Residence-based Taxation. They are also calling for testimonials about how legislation is affecting you and for your support in by writing the Tax Committee directly responsible for tax reform and asking for the implementation of RBT.
Update on Residence-Based Taxation RBT – August 2014
ACA has been hard at work in Washington, DC bringing RBT to the attention of the legislature and the Administration. ACA has met with all the members of the Americans Abroad Caucus, and the Ways & Means and Senate Finance committees. ACA has been asked by the committees involved in tax reform to provide our input on the tax treatment of Americans living and working overseas. We are proud that ACA is now the government “go to” source for information on many of the issues affecting overseas Americans, and we regularly submit comments to government hearings on issues important to our membership.
Media attention on the issues of overseas Americans is growing. More and more major media outlets like Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, Time, Politico and others are talking about RBT and FATCA. Much of this attention is due to the ACA commitment to bringing the issues of overseas Americans to the attention of the media. ACA is regularly solicited for interviews and quoted in the media.
ACA was the first overseas organization to advocate for “Same Country Exception” for FATCA and the first to develop a specific detailed proposal for Residence-Based Taxation (RBT). ACA is pleased to see that other organizations such as Democrats Abroad and Republicans Overseas have picked up our messaging on FATCA and taxation and are also advocating to the Washington legislature and the Administration on this subject.
ACA’s Comprehensive Compliance Procedure was the basis of the recent IRS Streamlined Foreign Offshore Program, which allows a low- to no-risk process for Americans overseas to become tax compliant.
In addition, ACA was able to get a special provision inserted first in a number of Intergovernmental Agreements and then in the FATCA regulations, requiring local overseas banks not to discriminate against Americans if they want to qualify for certain types of favorable treatment. ACA is one of the few, if not the only, organization representing Americans abroad that has the expertise and working relationships to permit it to work on a technical level like this.
ACA continues to advocate on behalf of Americans living and working overseas and the organization is truly the Voice of Americans Overseas. ACA is listening to you and Washington is listening to ACA.
Send us your testimonials on how current legislation is affecting you. These testimonials are important to our advocacy work but even more important is your work in contacting your own Congressional representative. We ask you to write to your representative today and let him or her know your thoughts and personal experience, and please send a copy to ACA as well.
You can also support our work by writing directly to the Tax Committees responsible for tax reform and asking for RBT. Go HERE
In all your communications to Congress, if you need to use a US residential address, use your last known address in the United States, the same one from which you are registered to vote.
I tried posting this yesterday but got caught up in the anti-spam plug-in mess mentioned in a separate thread today. Will try again. This is a cross-post of my comment over on IBS to the parallel thread on this topic (with a couple of additions).
If you actually consider yourself to be a US citizen and want to remain one, and live outside the US, organizations like ACA are your cup of tea, and you should support them. If you think it will make any real difference (I share Victoria’s and others’ pessimism on that point), sure, give them a testimonial.
If like most folks I know who are involved in this site, or who are posting on it at least, you do NOT consider yourself to be a US citizen, haven’t for years if ever as an adult, and have utterly no desire ever to become a US citizen and consider your sole loyalty, allegiance and citizenship to be that of some country other than the US (like Canada, still and God willing), then ACA isn’t for you.
Are you and do you personally consider yourself to be (and wish to remain) an “American citizen abroad,” or not? It boils down to that, I think.
I’m intrigued to hear of a possible EU court challenge (see one of Victoria’s comments on the IBS thread), that would be great if it happens. In the meantime, in Canada the only hope for those whom the US considers to be US citizens and who don’t want that, is the court challenge. Please donate at the ADCS website (see the pinned main post on the home page of Isaac Brock or Maple Sandbox for details and a link). IMO that would be a far better use of your money than blowing it on an ACA membership, unless of course you actually do consider yourself to be an American Citizen Abroad. If so, good luck to you, you’re going to need it.
To the above, I would add the following caution to those who have a claim to a pre-2004 relinquishment CLN. Perhaps this is paranoia, perhaps not, but … if you are claiming you committed an expatriating action other than renunciation with the intent to lose your US citizenship, I think it could be a serious mistake to join or ally yourself or maybe even contribute a testimonial to any organization named “American Citizens …” Abroad or anything else. If you’re not an American citizen or at least don’t consider yourself to be one and haven’t for years, why publicly align yourself with them? Think about it, carefully. Especially if your personal name and address get published (as the result of a testimonial). That might be considered a refutation or contradiction of your relinquishment claim, at least in my non-lawyer’s opinion.
I have never considered joining ACA because I am emphatically not an american.
I appreciate their efforts but it’s just one prong of the attack.
My money goes to the court challenge fund.