Few recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have hit American expat taxpayers, and the experts who advise them on tax matters, as powerfully as last Tuesday's decision in a long-running FBAR case involving a "non-willful" dual citizen named Alexandru Bittner.

(...or possibly not...)

Regular watchers of the way U.S. officials have been prosecuting American taxpayers whom they deemed to have committed "non-willful" breaches of the government's so-called FBAR regulations didn't have to be asked twice for their thoughts on Tuesday's landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that – at long last – finally established how penalties for such breaches are to be determined. 

Hearing Americans who've been living abroad for 10 or more years, and sometimes for most of their adult lives, describe how they got there is always interesting, I find. Many people's stories, of course, tend to be variations on a couple of predictable themes (work reasons, falling in love with someone from the country in question, etc.).

Vince Truong, however, says he was drawn to Dubai by an article he read...

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).

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." 

A group of American expats located in at least four different countries is laying the groundwork for a major legal challenge against "the application of U.S. citizenship-based taxation" to Americans who are living outside of the U.S.

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... 

John Richardson, the Toronto-based citizenship lawyer and American expat rights campaigner, will be the featured guest tomorrow on a weekly FAIRtax Guys "show" that airs every Tuesday at 8pm EST on Facebook; Rumble.com; and – in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia or New Zealand only – on iHeart.com.

For years, ordinary taxpayers as well as seasoned tax professionals (and even, we can reliably say, certain financial journalists) who've been seeking answers to tax queries on the IRS's website have stumbled across a surprising – and for most, we think – endearing feature: a collection of some 15 tax quotations.

More than 500 names have appeared on the U.S. government's latest list of Americans who have, as the Federal Register (where the names appear) puts it, chosen to expatriate," a relatively low quarterly number, given that only four quarters in the past six years have contained fewer names. (See table, above.)