We retired Tax Justice Blog in April 2017. For new content on issues related to tax justice, go to www.justtaxesblog.org
(Updated 1/24/2014 to reflect the fact the resolution passed.)
At its yearly winter meeting, the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling for the repeal of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a major law enacted in 2010 (as part of the HIRE Act) to clamp down on offshore tax evasion.
FATCA was enacted in the wake of revelations that the Swiss bank UBS had helped American citizens evade U.S. income taxes by illegally hiding income in offshore accounts. The most important provisions of FATCA basically require Americans, including those living abroad, to tell the IRS about offshore assets greater than $50,000, and apply a withholding tax to payments made to any foreign banks that refuse to share information about their American customers with the IRS.
Those who are directly affected by FATCA are likely to be few in number and they certainly have the means to fill out the disclosure form required with their federal income tax return under its provisions. The $50,000 threshold excludes housing and other non-financial assets. That means that even a relatively well-off American who works for a few years abroad and even someone who owns a house abroad will not be affected unless they hold over $50,000 in cash or financial assets in the other country.
Whatever inconvenience is caused by these requirements is far outweighed by the benefits to the U.S. and its law abiding taxpayers. According to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), FATCA’s anti-tax evasion measures are estimated to raise $8.7 billion (PDF) over their first decade of implementation. (JCT does have a history of underestimating tax enforcement measures.) Considering that the U.S. loses an estimated $100 billion (PDF) annually due to offshore tax abuses, this seems like a modest reform.
In May 2013, Senator Rand Paul introduced legislation to repeal the important parts of FATCA, claiming that this is necessary to protect privacy. But there simply is no right of Americans to hide income from the IRS. As we explained at that time, for a country with a personal income tax (like the U.S.), that kind of information sharing is indispensible to tax compliance, as the IRS stated in its most recent report on the “tax gap”:
“Overall, compliance is highest where there is third-party information reporting and/or withholding. For example, most wages and salaries are reported by employers to the IRS on Forms W-2 and are subject to withholding. As a result, a net of only 1 percent of wage and salary income was misreported. But amounts subject to little or no information reporting had a 56 percent net misreporting rate in 2006.”
Other opponents of FATCA, like the Wall Street Journal, have claimed that it is causing Americans living abroad to renounce their U.S. citizenship, but as we have pointed out, those renouncing citizenship make up a tiny fraction of one percent of the six million Americans living abroad.