ACA and overseas organizations meet with IRS/Treasury officials

In the follow-up letter to the November 2012 IRS/Treasury meeting, it was mentioned that the principal subjects discussed were as follows:

• The need for some type of Advisory Council on issues faced by taxpayers abroad; 
• FATCA and problems for Americans residing outside the US—in particular, filing difficulties for Americans overseas; 
• Desirability of outreach and increased information for overseas filers;
• What we believe is "overkill" in the area of voluntary disclosure for Americans overseas;
• And access to information concerning certain revenue estimates.

ACA continued to highlight the serious ramifications that the FATCA legislation and FBAR reporting were causing, primarily in the denial of foreign financial services for Americans living overseas. Topics discussed involved increasing carve-outs for FATCA, harmonizing reporting for both FATCA and FBAR, increasing thresholds for FBAR reporting, improving outreach and centralizing information for overseas filers, facilitating compliance for low to no risk filers among other topics.

The overseas organizations also strongly recommended that an ongoing dialogue for these issues is necessary and suggested that a working group or advisory panel be created where members of the overseas organizations and other Americans living outside the US, along with Treasury Department/IRS representatives could meet on a regular basis to review and discuss the workings of the US tax and foreign assets reporting system as applied to Americans abroad, including but not limited to FATCA, FBAR and the foreign earned income exclusion. The goal would be to identify areas of concern and to develop solutions that can be implemented with the help of both taxpayers and the Government.

A copy of this letter was published the Tax Notes section of the Dec. 10, 2012 issue of Taxanalysts© with the following introduction: “Marylouise Serrato and Charles Bruce of American Citizens Abroad and three other members of groups representing overseas taxpayers have summarized recent discussions with Treasury in which they asked for the creation of an Advisory Council on Taxpayers Abroad that would focus on the tax issues relating to taxpayers residing outside the United States.”

ACA was pleased to see that following our meeting, Treasury issued an updated Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) that includes easing measures for overseas financial institution that will allow them to maintain American clients. Click here for the complete PRWeb press release.