Thursday, July 23, 2015

accepting new info

It has been frustrating that so many homeland Americans do not understand the plight of expats.

Terms like traitor, tax cheat may be some of the nicer words used against us.

Of course, if the homelanders never faced the problem, they don't realise that the US is only industrialized country to collect taxes on a citizen's world wide income for life and to be considered American for taxation you have to be:
  • born there even if you only spent a day
  • born of a US parent anywhere in the world other than the US and may or may not ever stepped on US soil
  • hold a green card but no longer live in the US
What they also don't realize in the wake of trying to collect unpaid taxes (much less than imagined) they've bullied banks into becoming their spies until most banks simply shut any American out of any banking services. For once I don't blame the banks which have spent billions trying to comply. The draconian punishments are not worth Americans' accounts.

However being shut out of ordinary banking activities leaves anyone with a hint of the stars and stripes in their blood and living outside the US unable to function financially merely because they were born in a place where they no longer live.

Countless articles have been written about ungrateful citizens without the writer taking the time to ascertain the full story.

One such article was written by Stephen  Richard Levine.

Several people wrote him telling him the other side of the story. Often when we've done that the author has refused to consider that what we are saying just might have some merit. A few have hurled even more invectives.

Levine, on the other hand, graciously published some of our letters without compromising some of his points to which he is entitled.  www.onecitizenspeaking.com/2015/07/another-look-at-fatca-.html

He took his true fact, but it with our true fact and came out with the truth.

Thank you Stephen.

2 comments:

One Citizen Speaking said...

I have come to realize that FATCA is a catch-22 law; one that allows those who might avoid or evade to continue their avoidance and/or evasion, while trapping accidental citizens or expats in a web of costly complexity. Thank you for this article.

DL NELSON said...

Thank you for being open