In 2010, when President Obama signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act into law – hidden inside a domestic jobs bill few still remember, called the HIRE Act – Rebecca Lammers had been only been living in London for a few years, although she'd done a couple of semesters of college abroad (in Ecuador and London).

 After a Washington DC judge on Wednesday dismissed a crowd-funded legal challenge brought last year by a Paris-based organization of accidental Americans and around nine co-plaintiffs over the way their ability to "voluntarily expatriate" had become all-but-impossible – which they said was a violation of the U.S. Constitution – the plaintiffs gave notice yesterday of their plans to appeal.

An appeals court in Ottawa has affirmed the constitutionality of the way the Canadian government allows Canadian financial institutions to share the information of their U.S. account-holders with the authorities in the U.S., ending the latest round of a years-long battle by two U.S. born Canadian women who are known informally to their supporters as "Gwen and Kazia." 

(..as FATCA critics respond with calls for immediate EU action)                                                                          

A new report by a European Parliamentary think tank that had been commissioned by the Parliament's Committee on Petitions (PETI) to "update" a previous report on the subject of "FATCA Legislation and its Application at the International and EU Level" is being welcomed by FATCA critics in Europe for its acknowledgement of certain  concerns about the way the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is implemented that the original report didn't fully identify.

The news that banks in the Netherlands will not, in fact, be obliged to begin requiring their U.S. person account-holders to have U.S. Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TINs), such as Social Security numbers, as of Sept 1, has (unsurprisingly) been welcomed by such TIN-lacking U.S. persons in that country.

(Particularly since Sept. 1 came and went more than a week ago...)

The Association of Accidental Americans, a Paris-based advocacy organization, together with 20 “accidental Americans” (persons deemed to be U.S. citizens because they happened to have been born in the U.S. but who've lived all of the rest of their lives elsewhere, as citizens of other countries), yesterday filed a motion to expedite a legal challenge it filed in 2020, over the legality of the Renunciation Fee.

A delegation of European Parliamentarians who met with U.S. officials in July, during what was described at the time as a "fact-finding mission" aimed at coming up with "concrete solutions" to the myriad FATCA-related problems certain EU citizens have been struggling with for years, has come away with a view that "efforts are underway to correct [these] injustices". 

The back-and-forth between the Dutch government and so-called accidental Americans who happen to be Dutch residents and citizens has resumed within the last few days, with a "Fourth Progress Letter [on] FATCA" having been issued on Monday by the country's State Secretary for Finance, Marnix van Rij. As usual, a response was immediately forthcoming from the Netherlands Association of Accidental Americans (NLAA) – which, again as usual, insisted that in fact, "no progress" on FATCA had yet been made. 

As the UK's tax collection agency, HM Revenue & Customs, is reported to be preparing to reach out to "hundreds" of customers of a bank located in Puerto Rico over possible tax irregularities, financial services industry observers have been pointing out that the bank in question is located in one of five U.S. territories that, like the United States itself, have not signed up to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard (CRS).