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.
Back in the 1960s, before Richard Nixon became U.S. president (in 1969), few "ordinary" Americans who lived abroad gave much, if any, thought to filing U.S. tax returns, let alone Foreign Bank Account Reports. Nor did the U.S. government seem much interested in finding out whether such expats might have overseas bank accounts, unless these expats were known to be wealthy.
In what is being seen as a major victory for Americans with non-U.S. bank accounts that they've failed to report to U.S. officials, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that the US$10,000 maximum penalty for such non-disclosure, if it's found to have been "non-willful," is to be applied on a per-form basis, and not per account.
Focus Financial Partners, the NASDAQ-listed, New York-based partnership of independent, fiduciary wealth management firms that had been growing rapidly in recent years, especially in the wake of its 2018 initial public offering, today announced that it would accept a bid by a major U.S. private equity firm to take it private.
European buyers are "disappearing" from the London property scene, while Russian oligarchs are no longer as welcome as they were before their country invaded Ukraine a year ago. But such buyers are increasingly being replaced by "U.S. technology billionaires" who are "bolstered by the strong dollar and eager to buy a European base," according to a report in London's Times newspaper and news website today.
Emily Cooper, the aspiring marketing executive played by Lily Collins in the popular Emily in Paris Netflix series, would probably be too old to qualify for it, but other young Americans living in the French capital are being offered a new student membership rate of just €10 a year (US$10.55, £8.82) by the Paris-based Association of Americans Resident Overseas.
A group of "accidental Americans" responded to the dismissal, on Friday, of their legal challenge of the U.S. government's citizenship renunciation regime, by filing an immediate appeal.
In the early years of this century, a number of major media exposés reported how Homeland Americans, as well as rich people from other developed and developing countries, were making...
Mar-18-2023
