Democrats Abroad today released a survey on how FATCA affects everyday Americans every day.
There is absolutely nothing new in the report. It is what many of us have known for three years.
There is nothing in the report about those of us who don’t even consider ourselves American under attack by the United States of Arrogance.
Worst of all, there is not one single recommendation to The Democrats or Congress about how to fix FATCA.
Meanwhile, over at Brock, there is discussion of You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer. That is why USCitizenAbroad is joining Democrats Abroad (aka Stepford Wives). Read the exchange a woman in France had with Democrats Abroad.
@Lynne,
I haven’t read the results of the survey, but since you said it contains no solutions I thought I’d point out that Democrats Abroad have been pushing the idea of the “same country exception”. I didn’t know about this until yesterday when I read the “Stepford Wives” discussion that you referenced here.
While I think the exception would be made, I don’t believe it would impact the cost for FFIs to comply with FATCA (as DA claims) unless FFIs in turn decided to terminate all accounts held by non-resident US persons, assuming this would allow them to be totally non-reporting deemed-compliant FFIs. By this I mean the development, maintenance and processing cost would likely be nearly the same whether the implemented system turned up 0.1% or 10% of the clients of an FFI.
Of course, the need and desire for a same country exception is just a small part of the overall problem of CBT.
I meant to include this link in my previous post:
https://www.democratsabroad.org/group/fbarfatca/july-2014-reforming-fatca-same-country-exception
French parliamentary debate on the legislation to implement FATCA is on the agenda THIS MORNING. You can watch it live here. Session starts at 9:30 and the FATCA law is #4 on the agenda http://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/direct.html
The Democrats are playing a very dirty game. They are fully aware that CBT is ridiculously unfair. The increase in the number of renunciations and amount of bad press the issue is getting is forcing them to publicly acknowledge the problem, hence the no-shit-Sherlock “research” results.
However, the Democrats will be careful to move ever so slowly towards solving the problem so not to rock the boat before they have a chance to grab a windfall of cash through at least one grand FBAR fundraising jubilee.
Does anybody remember the stupid law congress made that forced all businesses in the homeland to file 1099s for every single transaction over USD 600?
Obama finally had to repeal it. But the dumb-asses who created it to begin with are probably still in office and most likely were involved in the creation of FATCA as well.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-14/obama-signs-law-repealing-business-tax-reporting-mandate-1-.html