Repeal FATCA campaigners have met a wall of silence from the corridors of power in Washington DC.
Despite Republican promises to scrap the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act on road to the presidential election, since Donald Trump has taken his seat in the Oval Office everything has gone quiet.
Repeal FATCA is a lobby group made up of 24 separate lobby groups with significant political clout in Washington.
But despite their continued protest, their pleas and letters to politicians have met with no response.
A leading member of the Repeal FATCA group is Nigel Green, CEO and founder of global financial services firm deVere Group.
Trump’s promise
“President Trump should now make good on his promise that he will be ‘president for all Americans’ including ‘the forgotten men and women of our country who will be forgotten no longer’ by abandoning this achingly un-American policy once and for all,” he said.
“Americans live under one of the worst tax systems in the entire world. It’s now time that the President should recognize the embarrassment of this draconian regime and join the rest of the civilised world, which has long acknowledged that residence and/or territoriality are the only criteria upon which a fair income tax system should be founded.
“The American tax policy is not the global norm. And there’s a reason for this: it is fundamentally unjust to tax a people for their national identity alone.”
Green has vowed to continue the campaign against FATCA regardless of the lack of support from the White House and Congress.
Tax shackles
“It is beyond the time that America releases her citizens from the rusty tax shackles and implements a new, modern fairer tax system so that all US citizens can enjoy the same freedoms and prosperity as everyone else in the world,” he said.
FATCA reporting for US taxpayers and expats started in 2015.
The law calls for foreign financial institutions to report details of their finances to the US Internal Revenue Service every year.
More than 100 countries have tax treaties with the US to ease the swapping of tax information, while almost 300,000 financial institutions have registered under FATCA rules.
