The Institute of Tax Law at Queen Mary University's Centre for Commercial Law Studies in London will today (June 29) host a panel discussion, via Zoom, on the topic of "the Taxation of Expatriate and Cross-Border Individuals."

The event will see a number of well-known experts on the subject sharing their views, including QMUL's own Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Tax Law, Bernard Schneider.

On Wednesday (June 16), viewers of a "virtual" three-hour, full Senate Finance Committee hearing on the subject of President Biden's Fiscal Year 2022 budget were witness to a rare, 6 minute, 42-second exchange between Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D, Massachusetts) and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, about Elizabeth Warren's so-called "Ultra-Millionaire Tax."

The Institute of Tax Law at Queen Mary University's Centre for Commercial Law Studies in London will host a panel discussion, via Zoom, on June 29, on the topic of "the Taxation of Expatriate and Cross-Border Individuals," featuring a number of experts on the subject, including QMUL's own Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Tax Law, Bernard Schneider.

As regular American Expat Financial News Journal readers will already know, Toronto-based American/Canadian lawyer John Richardson, pictured above left, is one of the most visible and outspoken crusaders on behalf of American expatriate issues on the global stage...

Over the last few years, thousands of so-called "accidental Americans" have quietly accepted the unexpected news that the U.S. considered them to be U.S. citizens, even though they had lived their entire lives as citizens of other countries, and as a result of this news, gone through the expensive business of complying with U.S. demands that they sort out their U.S. citizenship and tax situation.

The U.S. government on Thursday published its latest quarterly list of the names of Americans who have renounced their citizenships, and as expected, due to  the fact that renunciation-processing is difficult at the moment, owing to the continuing Covid-19 lockdown in many countries, only 228 names appeared.

This compares with 660 in the final quarter of 2020. If all four quarters of 2021 saw only 228 names listed in each, it would total only 912, and represent the lowest annual number of renunciations since 2009. 

On April 22, 2021, the board of Stop Extraterritorial American Taxation submitted the organization's comments to the Senate Finance Committee, in response to the committee's Overhauling International Taxation document, posted on the committee's website.

The uniquely American definition of “tax residency,” which includes the imposition of worldwide taxation on the tax residents of other countries who happen to be American (even if they don't realize it), has left the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in charge of overseeing the implementation of three separate and distinct tax systems: residence, source, and extraterritorial, according to Paris-based attorney and U.S. taxpayer rights campaigner Laura Snyder, Toronto-based U.S. citizenship lawyer John Richardson, and Australia-based, recently-retired university lecturer and FixtheTaxTreaty.org founder Karen Alpert...

"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...