Campaigners over the way the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA is being enforced throughout Europe have begun writing to EU officials – and making this  correspondence public – to ask why it's taking so long for the EU to respond to questions formally raised more than a year ago over FATCA's compatibility with EU data protection regulations.

An English-language news website based in Amsterdam has become the latest non-U.S. media organization to highlight the struggles that overseas-resident Americans – "accidental or otherwise", as it says in its headline – are having, in dealing with the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA. 

In what's being seen as a potentially significant development, the Steering Committee of the Democrats Abroad's Taxation Task Force has announced that it has "voted in support of submitting a resolution to 'update' the Democrats Abroad FATCA policy from 'reform' to 'repeal'."

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.

A major report detailing what are said to be the compliance shortcomings of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, just made public within the past 24 hours by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, has sparked interest and concern among FATCA-watchers around the world, including American expatriates and the tax experts, lawyers and political advocates who represent them.

In a rare live webinar interview with a financial media representative, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig is set to discuss "the current state of the IRS" this afternoon at 2pm EDT (7pm British time, 8pm CEST) with Tax Analysts president and chief executive Cara Griffith.

A long-awaited appellate court hearing in a years-long challenge of Canada's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act-implementation legislation is set to get underway today, in a hearing room in Canada's Federal Court of Appeal in Vancouver, British Columbia.

To the surprise of many businesses and observers across Europe, few of whom had seen it coming, U.S. and European Union officials said today that they had reached a preliminary agreement on a new data privacy deal, to replace the long-standing agreement that had been declared illegal in July, 2020 by the EU Court of Justice.

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.