Democrats Abroad finally come to their senses on FATCA

Democrats Abroad are poised to vote on a resolution to change their position on FATCA from ‘reform’ to ‘repeal’. They are 12 years too late to stop their party from inflicting this horror on overseas Americans, and EIGHT YEARS LATER than the Republican Party in seeking to repeal FATCA.

Just a reminder that Republicans Overseas and the RNC have maintained strong opposition to FATCA:

  • The RNC passed a resolution to repeal FATCA on January 24, 2014
  • Republicans Overseas sued the US Treasury over FATCA beginning in 2015
  • The 2016 GOP Platform included a transition to RBT and the repeal of FATCA
  • In 2016, Republicans Overseas submitted a request to repeal FATCA to the House Ways and Means Committee
  • In 2017, Republicans Overseas submitted a resolution to the US Senate Finance Committee calling for the repeal of FATCA and a transition away from CBT
  • Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Mark Meadows introduced legislation in 2017 to repeal FATCA
  • In April 2017, The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Subcommittee on Government Operations, led by Congressman Mark Meadows,  held a hearing on the Unintended Consequences of FATCA
  • Republicans Overseas worked closely with Congressman George Holding to craft the Tax Fairness For Americans Abroad Act of 2018, which–if passed–would have helped to make FATCA irrelevant.

We welcome DA to join the right side of history–even if it has taken them 8 years longer than Republicans Overseas to reach the correct conclusion.

RO Decries Biden Plan to Spy on Domestic American Bank Accounts

Republicans Overseas decries the Biden regime’s plan to spy on Americans’ domestic bank accounts and report balances and transactions to the IRS. We have lived with this for a decade, and we know how bad it can be.

Read the full press release here. 

 

Republicans Overseas has asked for an Executive Order to alleviate tax & regulatory burdens

Republicans Overseas has sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, urging him to ask President Trump for Executive Orders that would:

  1. Exempt small businesses from the GILTI and Transition Taxes;
  2. Create a Commission on Overseas Americans to consider remedies for the harms done to Americans abroad via onerous regulations such as FATCA;
  3. End citizenship-based taxation by instructing Treasury to redefine “individual” in Section 1 of the 1913 Tax Code to ‘resident of the USA

We hope that President Trump will consider extending tax and regulatory cuts to overseas Americans.

 

 

Well-known FATCA opponent Mark Meadows is Trump’s new chief of staff

Congratulations to Congressman Mark Meadows who is named as President Trump’s new Chief of Staff. 9 million overseas Americans now have a friend in the White House who not only sponsored a House #FATCA repeal bill but also held a House FATCA hearing for them.


Mark Meadows, a Republican Party stalwart who introduced a bill aimed at repealing key elements of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in September, 2016, has been named to replace Mick Mulvaney as chief of staff in President Trump’s administration. 

The news was immediately greeted by Republican expatriates as a sign that their voices might be heard more clearly by Republican policy-makers in the lead-up to this November’s presidential election.

Meadows, who represented North Carolina in the House of Representatives, had announced that he would not run for re-election to his seat. He will become Trump’s fourth chief of staff in 38 months, the most that any U.S. president has had in such a short time, according to U.S. press reports.

Read the full article at The American Expat Financial Journal.

10 Years On from FATCA

On March 18, 2010, President Obama signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act into law. Surprising as it might now seem to some, the fact went virtually unnoticed by the world’s media, as the legislation was buried deep inside a domestic jobs bill known as The HIRE Act.

Read more here.

 

RO will take the FATCA fight to the U.S. Supreme Court

Heritage Foundation publishes article in support of repealing FATCA

by Patrick Tyrell, The Daily Signal

October 13, 2017

If you’re an American living overseas, Uncle Sam is making life hard for you—and he’s probably giving your bank a headache, too.

For one, the U.S. government often taxes the earnings you make outside the U.S., meaning you can be double-taxed—both by the U.S. and by your host country. But even if you don’t owe U.S. taxes, reporting your foreign earnings to the IRS can be expensive and complicated.

In addition to that, if you live overseas, your bank is probably quite annoyed at you and has an incentive to stop doing business with you.  Read more here. 

Plaintiffs in FATCA Challenge Seek En Banc Rehearing

Plaintiffs in Crawford, et al. vs. US Department of Treasury, et al. have filed a filed a Petition for En Banc Rehearing in their fight against the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (“FATCA”) and related provisions after the Sixth Circuit affirmed the lower district court’s ruling that none of the plaintiffs had standing, i.e., sufficient harm to bring a challenge.

For a complete analysis of the reasoning behind the filing, please read the entire document here.

Memo detailing grounds for challenging 6th Circuit Court’s Opinion

James Bopp, Jr. (lead lawyer for the Plaintiffs) and Richard E. Coleson have drafted a memo to analyze the 6th Circuit Court’s decision could and to highlight where the 6th Circuit Court made mistakes in its decision.

Read the memo here.

Republicans Overseas vows to take FATCA battle ‘to Supreme Court’

By: Helen Burggraf | 22 Aug 2017 | International Investment

‘An anti-FATCA lobbying group led by key US Republican Party members has vowed to take its fight against the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act to the Supreme Court, in the wake of a US Court of Appeals decision, handed down on Saturday, that affirmed a lower district-court ruling dismissing a legal attempt to derail the legislation. 

In a statement on its website, the Republican Overseas Action group said it intends to continue its campaign against the law, arguing that it is causing “real harm” to overseas Americans – contrary, they say, to what the court said in its ruling.

The Court of Appeals ruling found that the plaintiffs – who included Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul, who has been campaigning against FATCA almost since it was signed into law in 2010 by President Obama – lacked the standing to sue, and that the harms they claimed to have suffered as a result of the law were not, in fact, directly caused by it.’ ….

Read the rest of the full article here.