How U.S. expats can better make their voices heard in Washington will be the subject of a Zoom meeting scheduled for this Thursday evening (for those living in Europe), sponsored by the Paris-based Association of Americans Resident Overseas.

As the 2021 tax reporting season trundles along in Expatland, we decided to highlight some of the events taking place – mostly online, still, owing to the Covid pandemic – that are aimed at U.S. expats... 

Paul Atkinson, who chairs the banking committee of the Paris-based Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO), will answer viewers' questions on "the everyday challenges" Americans abroad are increasingly facing, as a result of banks deciding they no longer wish to accommodate American expat clients and cancelling them, during a Zoom "meet-up" next Thursday (Feb. 17).

William Jordan, president of the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, remembers what happened on this day in 2001 in the U.S...

Twenty years ago, on a beautiful late summer morning on the East Coast of the U.S., two planes struck the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and another slammed into the Pentagon across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. A fourth crashed near Shanksville, PA, after passengers realized what had happened in New York and the Washington area and decided to sacrifice themselves rather than let their aircraft become the fourth missile in a deliberate attack on the United States, its people, and what they represented.

As various expat organizations ramp up their efforts to persuade Washington lawmakers to move the U.S. away from its Civil War-era taxation regime, which is based on citizenship rather than residency, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas has revealed that 90% of more than 400 U.S. expats it surveyed last October and November support such a change. 

Spokespeople for advocacy organizations that represent American expatriate interests – as well as many expatriates themselves – have been expressing concern over what they say appears to be a significant lack of awareness among key U.S. lawmakers of how expat taxpayers currently struggle with U.S. tax regulations, based on these lawmakers' comments and testimony during a Senate Finance subcommittee 'Tax Gap' hearing on Tuesday.

Americans resident outside of the U.S. say they are having to "refrain from making certain investments" owing to the "penalizing" U.S. tax it would incur; missing out on overseas business and employment opportunities because of their U.S. tax obligations; and suffering from tax-induced "personal stress" as a result of the way their home country continues to tax them, even though they live abroad, according to some of the just-released findings of a major survey carried out towards the end of last year by SEAT, a Paris-based advocacy organization. 

Almost nine in 10 U.S. expats say they are "caught between two systems" when it comes to their banking and tax matters, according to the latest data to emerge from a major survey of more than 400 Americans who live outside of the U.S., carried out last October and November by the Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO).

On April 7, 2021, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas submitted its comments to the Senate Finance Committee, in response to the committee's review of U.S. international tax policy, and its impact on American workers. 

Below, AARO's comments in full, as written by AARO president William Jordan; AARO vice president for advocacy Fred Einbinder; and AARO banking committee chair Paul Atkinson.

(...But FATCA not directly to blame)

For more than a decade, American expats have reported finding it difficult to obtain or maintain a non-U.S. bank account while living overseas, usually owing to the banks' reluctance to have to comply with the 2010 tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA. But a new survey confirms something many have also been saying: That even U.S. banks often don't want U.S. expat clients either.