80% of Americans living and working overseas are considering giving up their U.S. citizenship, [View all]

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That’s one potential lesson we can draw from recent years’ explosion of U.S. citizens living and working overseas who are now renouncing their citizenship. In the first six months of 2014, 1,577 Americans decided to expatriate; last year, nearly 3,000 called it quits, a record high number. In the last five years, a total of about 9,000 Americans surrendered their citizenship, according to a survey of federal data compiled by Bloomberg.

“It’s not just the super-rich doing it,” David McKeegan of Hong Kong-based Greenback Expat Tax Services says in Forbes. “We’re talking average, middle-class people, people teaching English as a second language and doing freelance jobs making $30,000–50,000 a year, simply because of the fact that they can’t open locked bank accounts.”

“The vast majority of U.S. expatriates living abroad harbor a strong sense of patriotism that includes a willingness to shoulder their fair share of the nation’s tax burden,” Kuenzi writes. “Deep resentment arises, however, when they confront the byzantine complexity of preparing a tax return that includes non-U.S. income and non-U.S. financial accounts. FATCA demands rigorous compliance with arcane rules that the IRS has until now never even attempted to enforce on a widespread basis. For Americans abroad, desperately trying to comply, the outcome to family finances is often disastrous.”


https://www.uschamber.com/blog/exit-strategy-fatca-tax-law-keeps-pushing-americans-give-citizenship