Today the French association of Accidental Americans published the FATCA-letter of 20 July it received from the French ministry of foreign affairs, read the LinkedIn post by chairman Lehagre. The post:

📬 Réponse de la Ministre de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères à mon récent courrier relatif à #FATCA et aux problèmes rencontrés par les Américains accidentels pour renoncer à la nationalité américaine.

🙄 Rien de neuf si ce n’est que le MAE reste mobilisé…

Machine translation of the post:

📬 Response from the Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs to my recent letter regarding #FATCA and the problems faced by accidental Americans in renouncing US citizenship.

🙄 Nothing new except that the ministry of foreign affairs remains actively involved…

Machine translation of the letter:

In a letter dated 30 May 2022, you drew my attention to the fiscal and banking difficulties encountered by our Franco-American compatriots concerned by the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) of 2010.

As you point out, “accidental Americans”, French citizens who are also American nationals because they were born in the United States, are subject to obligations resulting from American fiscal legislation, even though they have no particular effective link with this country. The Government has for several years drawn the attention of the American authorities to their particular situation. Progress has been made, in particular by the introduction in September 2019 of a special amnesty procedure, which limits the obligation to pay US tax arrears for many dual nationals who decide to renounce their US nationality. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) clarification in October 2019 of the obligations of financial institutions to collect the fiscal identity numbers of their US clients also helps to clarify the situation of ‘accidental Americans’.

After these initial advances, the French authorities continued their dialogue with the US administration to further facilitate the procedures for our Franco-American citizens, by involving our European partners who are also concerned by this issue. France has thus included this subject on the agenda of the Council of the European Union from 2021, so that the issue can be brought to the attention of the US administration in a coordinated manner by the Member States and the European institutions.

This work, which was widely supported by our European partners, was structured in the first quarter of 2022, under the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union. They aimed to propose concrete solutions to the IRS “with a view to clarifying the obligations incumbent on European financial institutions under the FATCA law, and to respond to the difficulty of ‘accidental Americans’ living in Europe. On 31 May, the French Presidency organised a meeting with the IRS, which considered the European proposal to be a good basis for discussion, although amendments would be necessary. The Czech Republic, which will take over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2022, will continue to work on this issue with its European partners. The French authorities remain fully committed to this issue.

Thus, France, together with its European partners, has taken the initiative of an active dialogue with the US administration, with a view to resolving the difficulties you have mentioned. You may rest assured, Sir, that we are continuing this active dialogue in order to obtain decisive additional progress in favour of the “accidental Americans”.

As I said before: hopefully the U.S. starts to realize that their system of Citizenship Based Taxation is illegal and harming residents of other countries.

General information on this blog on FATCA and Citizenship Based Taxation:

• Introduction (in Dutch),
• Articles on this blog (Dutch and English),
• Page with links to articles etcetera by third party (Dutch and English),
• Information sources (Dutch).