First, U.S. investors living in Europe had to face FATCA. Now it’s the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II). 

Here, Jonathan Lachowitz, of Lexington, Massachusetts-based White Lighthouse Investment Management and chairman of the American Citizens Abroad, outlines the difficult position in which the legislation puts middle-class, overseas Americans when trying to buy simple exchange-traded funds (ETFs). (Such difficulties are, in fact, said to be behind reported plans by the European Commission, disclosed last week, to review and potentially make changes to the notoriously vast and complex MiFID legislation...)

In an appearance on a well-known Canadian radio talk show on Friday, Toronto lawyer John Richardson explained how U.S. regulations that require Canadian (and other non-U.S.) banks and financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service on their American account holders work, and described them as "incredibly intrusive".

Canada's Revenue Agency sent some 900,000 financial records to the U.S. tax authorities for the 2018 tax year, in connection with the country's agreement to enforce America's FATCA reporting requirements, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has reported. 

A number of European citizens who have been struggling for years with legacy American citizenship issues, as a result of the 2010 U.S. law known as FATCA, expressed their frustration with Europe's executive level of government – among others – during a two-and-a-half-hour European Parliament hearing on FATCA in Brussels yesterday. 

(Updated Nov. 10, 2019, to include information about registering to attend.)  The European Parliament's Petitions Committee has published details of its hearing scheduled for Tuesday,  Nov.12, on the "extraterritorial impact on EU citizens" of America's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

A British woman who was born in the UK and who has never lived or worked in the States described her battle with the U.S. over its determination to tax her, as an "accidental American," in powerful language on a much-listened-to BBC radio news show. 

Contrary to an apparently widespread belief back in the U.S. – and especially, it sometimes seems, among certain lawmakers in Washington – most American expats are not rich, and don’t live abroad in order to avoid their U.S. tax obligations, a new survey has found.

Under pressure from European banks in particular, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has issued clarification with respect to a FATCA requirement that "foreign financial institutions" be obliged to provide the so-called Tax Information Numbers of their American clients from January, 2020 onward, which tax experts say means that banks now won't have to close the accounts of their TIN-lacking "accidental American" clients at the end of this year.

Another British member of Parliament has come forward to question the UK's chancellor of the exchequer, on behalf of a dual American/British citizen constituent, as to what if any "recent representations he has made to his [U.S.] counterpart" with respect to "the creation of accidental Americans through the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act". 

Over the last few weeks and months, more media attention than usual has been paid to the 2010 Obama law known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). And invariably, we have been noticing, journalists from respected media organizations like The Guardian and Financial Times newspapers in London keep referring to it as a “tax evasion law,” no doubt because that was its original purpose.

That may well have been true in 2010, says Toronto-based expat lawyer and expat rights campaigner John Richardson...