"How U.S. international tax policy impacts American workers, jobs, and investment" may have been the official title of last week's Senate Finance Committee hearing, but according to John Richardson, Toronto-based lawyer and regular commentator on the ever-evolving American expat tax and citizenship regime, "that title had almost nothing to do with what actually transpired" during the two-and-a-half hour event.

Even though, he adds, it should have...

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 we thought it might be fun, for a change, to mark the occasion of FATCA's coming into force eleven years ago today by compiling a list of eleven impossible-to-resist questions about it, in order to test just how well we've all been paying attention!
See below...

Americans resident outside of the U.S., particularly those whom the U.S. government considers to be well off, have been wondering how Sen. Elizabeth Warren's recently-unveiled "Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021" is likely to affect them.

The latest U.S. Government posting of the Internal Revenue Service's "Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate" brought total U.S. citizenship renunciations in 2020 a record high of 6,705. 

After almost a year of pandemic-induced lockdowns, travel bans and similar restrictions on the ability of people to travel and meet up in the usual way, online "webinars" and "virtual conferences" have increased dramatically in the American expat-focused wealth management, tax and financial advice sectors.

For the first time since she began sponsoring her annual International Tax Conference in 2011, Deborah J. Hicks is arranging for the event to take place online this year, owing to the Covid pandemic, and consequent global lockdown.

John Richardson's latest podcast guest is, like Prince Harry, a British citizen who fell in love with, and married, an American.  

Unlike the prince, however, "Peter", a retired solicitor, didn't return to his wife's country with her, but remained in the UK, where they had two children – who, of course, the U.S. also regarded as American citizens, because of their mother's place of birth...

As tax experts, academics and others ponder the extent to which governments around the world are likely to introduce taxes aimed specifically at the wealthy – as these governments begin to attempt to repair their severely-damaged finances – our roving, Toronto-based webinar correspondent, John Richardson, interviews Chapman University professor Hank Adler on the subject.

American expats and "accidental Americans" have complained furiously for more than six years about the US$2,350 fee that the U.S. has charged (since 2014)  for the renunciation of one's American citizenship.

Bloomberg, the major global media organization based in New York, has once again published a strongly-worded opinion piece calling for action on behalf of America's expatriates that  it calls "A Letter From 9 Million U.S. Expats to Janet Yellen."