News that a French bank has been ordered to pay damages to a Canadian client whom it had erroneously thought to be American, and whose details it had thus transferred to the U.S. under FATCA, is being seen by some in the American expat community as yet another reason that banks and other financial services businesses may become even more wary of accepting American expats as clients going forward.

... but says greater resources needed 'to follow cross-border money flows'

American expats who tuned in last to last week's House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee hearing, in the hope of hearing IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig say something encouraging about plans to address their long-standing tax and FATCA-related issues, would have been disappointed, if not exactly surprised.

Twelve years after President Obama signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act into law – buried inside a domestic jobs bill known as the HIRE Act  – legal and political challenges targeting certain of its key provisions are continuing to progress, albeit slowly, in various "hot spots" around the world.

And yet, one more year on, and Washington lawmakers have still done nothing to mitigate the difficulties that U.S. expats struggle with, as a result of FATCA, in spite of these expats' increasingly-exasperated calls, as well as yet more calls for change on the part of the U.S. from growing numbers of foreign government officials, especially in Europe.   

Without really meaning to, many American expatriates as well as tax industry experts, lawyers and others have become experts on the subject of FATCA over the past decade-plus that it's been around.

So, as we did last year on this date, we thought it might be interesting to mark the occasion of FATCA's coming into force by compiling a list of twelve  impossible-to-resist questions about it, in order to test just how well we've all been paying attention! (Spoiler alert: Most of these are from last year, although some of the answers may have changed, and a few are new...) See below...

A long-awaited appellate court hearing in a years-long challenge of Canada's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act-implementation legislation will take place on March 30, sources involved in the matter are reporting. 

...as eight French politicians sign letter to him urging action during France's 6-month council presidency

Having been born in Australia and lived her whole life there, "Amy," as she wishes to be known here, had no idea that her life was about to be turned upside-down, and changed forever, in March, 2020, when someone from her bank said that they needed to ask her to fill in some details having to do with her citizenship.

Then suddenly, Amy says, her "OMG Moment" – as it's often referred to by accidental Americans, a group which Amy was soon to discover she was a member of – arrived... 

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).

In July of 2018,members of the European Parliament resoundingly approved a resolution which supported the right of Europe's estimated 300,000 "accidental Americans"  to be allowed to cast off their American citizenship (and thus their taxation by the U.S.) more easily and cheaply than is currently possible under U.S. law. (The vote was 470 to 43, with 26 abstentions.) 

A Dutch financial arbitration body known as KiFiD has ruled that a local banking operation of Dutch financial services giant Aegon was within its rights to close the savings account of one of its clients who has dual American and Dutch citizenship, because it did so as part of a larger business decision to close the part of its Dutch business in which the account was held to all of its clients in that operation.