In what might be seen as a timely move on the part of the Democrats Abroad, given the extent to which FBARs have been in the news this past week, the organization submitted a seven-page document to the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations ahead of hearings scheduled for this past Wednesday (March 8), in which it urged House lawmakers to make "needed" and "substantial adjustments to FinCEN Form 114, the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts or 'FBAR'." 

The Democrats Abroad UK (DAUK) Tax Committee will host the 2023 edition of its annual "Expat Tax 101" seminar next Tuesday (Feb. 21), both in-person and online, to help U.S. expats resident in the UK as they begin to prepare to file their 2022 U.S. tax returns.

If you were thinking of planning a protest by expatriate Americans against the U.S. system of citizenship-based taxation, it's difficult to think of a better day to do it than the date when expatriate American expats are obliged to file their U.S. tax returns by – which is to say, June 15 (two months after U.S. taxpayers' taxes are due). 

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).

In her midyear report to Congress back in June, the National Taxpayer Advocate noted that of some 73 million calls the IRS received, only about one in 10 actually reached an IRS employee, around the same percentage as had been reported during the previous tax season. But the time the average taxpayer spent waiting on hold this year "rose from 20 minutes to 29 minutes," NTA Erin Collins said.

Months after many observers might have expected to hear who’d been chosen to succeed Paris-based American expat campaigner Laura Snyder as the IRS’s sole overseas member of a grass-roots voluntary organization known as the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel, it’s at last emerged that London-based Rebecca Lammers has been chosen for the role.

In what's being seen as a potentially significant development, the Steering Committee of the Democrats Abroad's Taxation Task Force has announced that it has "voted in support of submitting a resolution to 'update' the Democrats Abroad FATCA policy from 'reform' to 'repeal'."