In an open, five-page letter, Green and his co-leader of the Campaign to Repeal Fatca, Jim Jatras, accused US Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin of having done nothing to abandon “the worst law most Americans have never heard of” after a year in office.
Honour promises
During the presidential election that saw Trump take office, the Republican party campaigned that they would call for a repeal of the Obama-era law if they won.
Dated 14 November, the letter stated: “We are writing to you on the supposition that in a democratic country, elections should have consequences. When a political party stands before the electorate on declared principles and makes specific promises, those principles and promises should be reflected in how that party governs under its mandate from the voters.”
The act has faced worldwide criticism after financial institutions refused to serve American clients due to the onerous costs associated with complying with Fatca.
In the letter, Green and Jatras wrote: “This Republican pledge to repeal Fatca rests on the deepest and most cherished American principles, not least a decent respect for the privacy of citizens who are not engaged in lawbreaking and are not even suspected of doing so.
“Even the IRS’s own Taxpayer Advocate Service has criticised Fatca’s ‘enforcement-oriented regime with respect to international taxpayers’ with its ‘operative assumption [that] appears to be that all such taxpayers should be suspected of fraudulent activity, unless proven otherwise’.”
Renunciation of citizenship
The letter follows the release of figures from the US Treasury Department showing that the number of Americans handing back their passports in the first nine months of 2017 is already higher than in the whole of 2016.
The total for 2016 was 5,411, which was the highest number on record and an increase of 26% compared with 2015.
However, if the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship in 4Q17 matches the record number of 2,365 in 4Q16, there will be another 26% year-on-year increase.
According to the Federal Register, the number of expatriations has been growing steadily since 2011, the first year in which more than 1,000 Americans chose to give up their citizenship.
