Since its passage in 2010, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has been delayed multiple times. Most recently the Treasury Department has pushed back 6 months the beginning of FATCA’s withholding penalty for noncompliant institutions, from January 1, 2014 to July 1, 2014. This newest delay is further proof that FATCA is poorly conceived and […]

Few know better than Americans living overseas the punitive and capricious nature of U.S. tax policy. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, law professor and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Colleen Graffy provided a clear and concise accounting of FATCA‘s destructive flaws from the point of view of an American overseas. The legislation is […]

I’ve written many times about how investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other successful people migrate from high-tax states to low-tax states. Well, the same thing happens internationally, as France’s greedy politicians are now learning. It’s a lot harder for Americans to escape our tax system, though, in part because of reprehensible exit taxes that […]

Yesterday, an article in The Wall Street Journal by Ben DiPietro reported that Senator Rand Paul is holding up “FATCA treaties” in the Senate. If only it were so, but this is simply untrue. There are no such FATCA treaties. The treaties in question are separate tax agreements that have nothing specifically to do with […]

There are many problems with the FATCA intergovernmental agreement (IGA) process. From a US perspective, they agreements represent a subversion of the proper treaty process, an unconstitutional expansion of executive powers, and an unwise commitment to saddle US banks with expensive new reporting requirements. From an international perspective, the IGA’s are deceptive and ill-advised. For […]

I recently noted that the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) would threaten America’s global economic dominance because, among other reasons, “Investment will instead go to places like China, where the government is unlikely to sign away their fiscal sovereignty to US tax collectors.” This view was seconded in a recent interview by Nigel Green, […]

If Congress set out right now to craft a law to sabotage the global competitiveness of the US economy, they’d have trouble coming up with one better than what they passed in 2010 in the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

I wrote recently about the need to draw a line in the sand on FATCA. Long story short, if current efforts to form an international tax cartel are not halted immediately, we can look forward to a future with a bleak economic outlook due to depressed worldwide investment, non-existent financial privacy for individuals and thus […]

Last week the Treasury Department finally released the oft delayed final rules for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. The 544 pages of rules seem to offer little in the way of surprises, but they do confirm that FATCA remains “the worst law most Americans have never heard of,” as recently dubbed by James Jatras. […]

In a recent column, Cal Thomas describes the account of a friend named “Sam,” who is learning that being an American overseas comes with high costs: I had read about financially motivated expatriates, but I never knew one until I visited with my longtime friend “Sam” (I’m withholding his real name to protect his current […]