Elizabeth May says FATCA a threat to Canadian rights and sovereignty.

[riverbendviewgal]

https://www.greenparty.ca/media-release/2014-03-05/fatca-threat-canadian-rights-and-sovereignty

OTTAWA – The Green Party of Canada is calling for greater public and parliamentary scrutiny of a recently announced tax agreement between Canada and the United States, stating that it threatens the rights of Canadians and may even violate the Constitution.

On February 5th, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that the United States and Canada had signed an intergovernmental agreement to implement the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). This U.S. law requires all foreign financial institutions to report the personal financial information of ‘U.S. persons’ living abroad to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

“Although it contains certain exemptions, the agreement negotiated by Minister Flaherty fails to address the most significant threats that FATCA poses to Canadian privacy and human rights,” said Elizabeth May, Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands and Leader of the Green Party of Canada. “This agreement also ignores the fact that Canada already has a robust information-sharing regime with the United States, and that Canada stands to gain virtually nothing from it.”

[davidpdx]

1. That is an interesting take on it

From strictly a devil's advocate point of view though, Americans are still subject to American law even when they aren't in the US. Making a privacy claim on something to do with the IRS is a hard sell. It's worth a try, but I'm not sure it will get the job done.

The change still needs to happen where the mistake began, which is Congress.

[riverbendviewgal]

2. America and Eritrea are the only countries in the world that use CBT - citizen based taxation

The whole rest of the world uses Resident based taxation.

read this link. and download the submission.
http://taxpol.blogspot.ca/2014/03/christians-cockfield-submission-to.html

Here is the abstract:
The United States enacted a tax reform in 2010 known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which will impose an extensive third-party monitoring and disclosure regime on financial institutions around the world in an effort to “smoke out” American tax cheats and expose their undeclared foreign assets to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The flow of information from Canadian financial institutions directly to the IRS that is required by FATCA would violate a number of laws in Canada. Accordingly, the United States has requested changes to these laws. The Canadian government now seeks to accommodate these requests in the form of an “intergovernmental agreement” (IGA) with the United States, which will be enacted into law as the Canada–United States Enhanced Tax Information Exchange Agreement Implementation Act (the Implementation Act) pursuant to a proposal released for comment by the Department of Finance. The Department of Finance invited public comments on these documents. We examined the proposed Implementation Act and the IGA and we find that they raise a number of serious issues ranging from likely constitutional violations to violations of international law. We submit these comments in the hope that they will help lawmakers and the public understand that FATCA, while intended to catch tax evaders, is poised instead to impose serious and unjustified harms on people who live around the world as non-resident U.S. citizens and green card holders, as well as their family members and business associates.



There is also a charter challenge to FATCA in Canada coming as well by many Canadians...

http://maplesandbox.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/News-Release-First-Legal-Step-To-Stop-FATCA.pdf

[riverbendviewgal]

3. If you happened to be born in UK

while your mom visited . Would you want to file UK taxes (at about 2k annually , even if you owned nothing to the UK) while you never lived in the UK all your life or worked there?

UK has resident based taxes so they don't require filing taxes filed for life , even if you don't live there, like the USA.

Is that fair?

Americans abroad live in countries that will assist them in times of war, because most live in peaceful countries and don't need to worry about that. It is an argument made on DU previous posts.

Down load that submission. It is astounding.