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).

France's National Assembly on Tuesday approved an amendment to the government's latest finance bill that would require the U.S. government to ensure that U.S. banks and financial institutions provide the same information to France's government about accounts held by French taxpayers that French financial entities are currently providing annually to the U.S. government, as they're required to do by the U.S. law known as FATCA.

When the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act finally came into force around the world in 2014 –  four years after it was signed into law by President Obama – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was preparing its own account information reporting regulations package.

The Common Reporting Standard, as it was to be known as, differed from FATCA in that it was intended to be global, and fully reciprocal – meaning that those countries participating in the collecting and forwarding of information about other countries' resident taxpayer's financial accounts would expect to receive the same data about their taxpayers resident in that country...