Today, March 18, 2023, is the 13th anniversary of the signing into law of FATCA. And as we've done in the past, we're marking the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act's 13th "birthday" today by sharing some of our favorite, impossible-to-resist questions about it, in order to test just how well we've all been paying attention.

We're doing this because we know only too well that, 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 13 years it's been around...   

The European Union intends to "ask about the posibility [of] a more permanent solution" to the problems Europe's "accidental Americans" are continuing to struggle with as a result of the 2010 U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act this week, when the latest in a regular series of bilateral meetings between the EU and U.S. is set to take place, an EU official has said. 

The Internal Revenue Service has quietly announced that it is introducing "temporary U.S. Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) relief" for non-U.S. banks and other "foreign financial institutions" located in certain countries, so that they won't be deemed to be in "significant non-compliance" of their obligations under the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA, because one or more of their apparently American citizen account-holders say they're unable to provide them with their U.S. taxpayer identification number (TIN).

(...but it's said no more reciprocal than other Model 1 IGAs)

Argentina has at last agreed a FATCA Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with the U.S. government, according to a statement on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Argentina, tax industry sources, and news reports in that country.

Until now, Argentina had not participated in the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Agreement program, which was signed into law in 2010, and came into force in 2014.

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).

(..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 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". 

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).