A major – and eagerly awaited by many – economic analysis of how the U.S. might most easily and efficiently move to a residence-based tax regime, crowd-funded and organized by the American Citizens Abroad, has found that such a move could be done "without the U.S. Treasury losing revenue".

A major new U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report released last week, detailing what it says are a number of shortcomings in the way the IRS has overseen compliance with FATCA since it was introduced in 2010, is the latest in a growing body of evidence of the need for Congressional hearings to be held into some of the taxation and citizenship issues America's expats are currently struggling with.

U.S. Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig may have focused on Homeland tax issues during a House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee hearing on "the 2022 Filing Season" last month, as reported. But interested stakeholders were invited to submit written comments for inclusion in the hearing record, and among those to do so – and in so doing, introducing the tax-filing issues currently facing millions of U.S. taxpayers who live overseas – was the American Citizens Abroad, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization. 

Once again, we're posting in our news section a selection of events from our regular "Listings" page, to help some of these online event sponsors and their audiences to find each other...

Don Beyer, a U.S. Democratic congressman who represents a Virginia constituency, has introduced legislation he says is aimed at making life significantly easier for American expatriates, by making it easier for them to comply with their U.S. tax obligations. 

The Democrats Abroad has announced that it has joined the Residence-Based Taxation Coalition, a lobbying organization launched in January with a single goal: persuading U.S. lawmakers to move the U.S. to a residence-based tax regime, like most of the rest of the world's countries have.

The American Citizens Abroad has called on Congressional leaders in both the House and Senate to "investigate" the fact that Americans with children who live outside of the U.S. are ineligible to benefit from certain improvements to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) that their Stateside counterparts have been receiving, since July, as a result of changes introduced by the Biden administration's "American Rescue Plan" legislation earlier this year.

In what some observers are hoping could represent a significant development in the American expatriate advocacy arena, a Republican representative from Miami, who has personal experience of life as an expatriate, has joined New York Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney as a co-chair of the Americans Abroad Caucus, which Rep. Maloney recently registered in the 117th Congress.

As news broke on Tuesday that four members of the U.S. House of Representatives had co-signed a letter to House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, in which they asked that a simplified, "short form" tax return be provided to American citizens who file their U.S. taxes from abroad, some expat campaigners and advocacy organizations insisted that such a simplification would not be enough.

As U.S. members of Congress have been reluctantly working in Washington this week to attend to urgent business – instead of taking the month off, as they normally would do this time year – many are reportedly also taking the opportunity to continue to press the Biden administration to provide Covid-19 vaccines to American expats who happen to live in certain far-flung parts of the world, where such vaccines are almost non-existent.