As a form of retaliation and especially when it’s perceived that the renunciation was done for tax reasons.
People in most of Europe and Australia/NZ , Taiwan, S.Korea and Japan don’t need a visa to visit the US. If someone goes to some other places such as China, Russia, Brazil, etc. they may have a problem.
People in most of Europe and Australia/NZ , Taiwan, S.Korea and Japan don’t need a visa to visit the US. If someone goes to some other places such as China, Russia, Brazil, etc. they may have a problem.
Admission to the US isn’t generally a function of where you’re located, but rather what citizenship you hold. If you go to China, Russia, or Brazil after renouncing your American citizenship, that fact alone isn’t going to cause you any problems for re-entering the US.
There have been cases of entry refusal as retaliation.
I’ve heard it can be an issue. Terry Gilliam is a former American citizen (he was born here) who moved to the United Kingdom, became a naturalized British citizen, and officially gave up his American citizenship.
You would think, in theory, this would place him in the same legal status as the other living members of Monty Python, who are all British citizens from birth. But it doesn’t. Because he renounced his American citizenship rather than having never had American citizenship, he is only allowed to spend a cumulative total of thirty days in the United States over a period of ten years. British citizens who are not former American citizens are allowed to stay in the United States for a period of up to ninety consecutive days and there is no legal limit to the total amount of time a regular British citizen can stay in the United States.
This law was enacted in order to prevent Americans from obtaining a foreign citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes and then continuing to reside in the United States.
What they need is a “visa waiver”. You might think that qualifying for a visa is not much different to qualifying for a visa waiver. I couldn’t possibly comment.
A strategy which this gentleman developed into an art form. Born American; renounced American citizenship for tax reasons, took citizenship of Ireland and Belize; talked the government of Belize into appointing him as consul to the United States (by offering them that, for his tenure, he would make his residence in Florida available for free as a consulate) in order to live in Florida anyway. This sparked the enactment of a legal provision restricting re-entry of former citizens who renounced their citizenship for tax reasons.
No, but they do need a visa waiver travel authorisation under ESTA, which is obtained by filling in an online application form. That application form asks for both current and former citizenships. I would imagine (though I have not tested this myself) that if you indicate a former American citizenship in this questionnaire, the ESTA application would be automatically rejected (in most cases, the application is processed immediately by an algorithm, without a human officer looking at it, and you get a result seconds after submission). Which does not mean you’re barred from entering the United States; you’re still free to submit an application for a regular visa, which may well be granted - but that would definitely be looked at by a human officer.
nice. so if you have family and friends in usa you want to visit. too bad.
OK, took a reed. Retards have screwed up the bill so it’s not even enforcable. Only two people got officially denied due to it. But how many unofficially?
Gilliam has said that one of the reasons he renounced his American citizenship was because of taxes. But he doesn’t fit the stereotype of a tax cheat. He had lived in the United Kingdom for forty years and had been a British citizen for over thirty years when he made the move to end his American citizenship. And he still resides in Britain. He’s not somebody who is trying to live in the United States while avoiding paying taxes here.
The United States has a unique policy on taxation. American law says that if you are an American citizen, you must pay taxes to the United States government. And that’s even if you live permanently outside the United States and do not work or earn any income within the United States. And when I said unique, I meant that literally; the United States is the only country which has such a policy.
I’m not one of the people who opposes all taxes but I feel this policy is wrong. I feel there should be some standard where you have to either reside in the United States or earn money in the United States to be liable to taxation. And the amount of tax liability should be proportionate to the percentage of residence and/or earning.
Moderator Note
Let’s avoid the gratuitous use of offensive words like “retard.” No warning issued, but you can make your comments without using such words.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’ve seen this before - but it’s not quite as bad as thirty days over 10 years. An ex-pat who renounced American citizenship will be required to pay income tax on their worldwide income if they spend more than 30 days in the US in any one year for a ten year period after renouncing citizenship. And apparently they are quite strict about it- to the point that I remember seeing a comment somewhere that someone who has a medical emergency while transiting through a US airport might literally have to choose between their money and their life as there are basically no exceptions to the 30 day limit.
It’s not unique. Eritreia is like that too 
There is some sort of standard in most/ a lot of places: tax treaties prevent double taxation. So my income in the country where I reside is taxed in the ordinary way, and I could claim that as tax paid against American tax. I’m in Australia: since the federal income tax here is higher than the American federal income tax, I wouldn’t have to pay American income tax.
And it is ~ proportional to residency ~ I would pay Aus tax during Australian residency, and not pay Aus tax while not resident, except that residency is typically not a day-to-day thing: your residency doesn’t change just because you are sleeping somewhere else.
It matters when you are a rich person in a low-tax tax shelter country, not paying very much tax at all, and perhaps not even living in your country of citizenship. Those people are a bit of a special case, and probably don’t really deserve your sympathy.
They are outnumbered by the many American citizen who just wind up living in another country, protected by double-taxation treaties, and for whom the big problems are American banking regulations, and filling out the American foreign-resident tax forms – which are an example of the worst aspects of the notoriously difficult American taxation system.
I’m not a strong person: trying to help do American tax for my mother brought me close to nervous breakdown, and I was only trying to do part of it. And you can’t just offload it on a very expensive specialist accountant. It really is difficult, and the very expensive specialist accountants are getting it wrong too. You are protected to a certain extent by the notoriously lax American IRS rules, which compensate for the fact that the American tax rules are too complex for the American IRS to understand and enforce, but it’s emotionally draining.
I gained British citenzenship about 20 years ago and gave up US citizenship about 8 years ago. When explaining why to someone saying “tax reasons” is a handy shorthand. For me it was all down to FATCA which was preventing me from investing in certain equity funds. Some European financial institutions don’t want to deal with the expense and hassle of complying with FATCA so simply refuse American customers.
I’ve not travelled back to the US since renouncing so don’t know if a visa waiver would be rejected or not. When I travel to Canada for work I make sure to get a direct flight to avoid any US stopovers.
The thing I find really really irritating is that although I never owe any US tax because it is all swallowed by tax credits for Canadian taxes paid, I still have to file a return. And if that isn’t bad enough, they have devised a special form of torture called FATCA that can be filled out only online and takes an entire afternoon of entering what is largely exactly the same information over and over again, with only a few numbers changing.
It would be legal for you as a U.S. citizen to own or control an offshore company in any non-shitlisted country (Iran, N Korea, Cuba, etc) as long as you fully comply with IRS regs. It’s a pain in the butt but you would have get much less friction from those European funds for example. Of course, proper IRS compliance for offshore companies is not cheap.
Eritrea doesn’t charge Eritrean citizens living in other countries the same taxes they would owe in Eritrea. Eritreans living outside of the country only pay a “diaspora” tax, which is two percent of their income.