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.

American expats and spokespeople for organizations representing them have been asking questions about the scale of U.S. expat data being forwarded to the U.S. under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, after the latest Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) report of such data revealed that around two thirds of the accounts sent actually fell below the US$50,000 FATCA reporting minimum threshold. 

 A U.S. Treasury report calling for "more enforcement and a centralized compliance effort" to deal with the large numbers of American citizens who are currently expatriating every year, to ensure that they're all paying the required amount of exit tax as they leave, has been discovered its contents made public by contributors to the Canadian advocacy website for dual Canadian/American citizens, the Isaac Brock Society.

Two dual Canadian/U.S. citizen plaintiffs in a long-running legal effort to block Canada’s implementation of the U.S.’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act have launched an appeal in Canadian Federal Court in Ottawa, after their most recent attempt to challenge the law was dismissed in July. 

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released today reveals a range of issues with the 2010 law known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which it noted also contributed to a "nearly 178%" increase in the rate of citizenship renunciations between 2011 and 2016.

Washington may be shut down for both the Christmas/New Year holidays and as a result of President Trump’s government-wide shutdown aimed at strong-arming Congress into approving his US$5bn plans to fund a wall along America’s border with Mexico.