Spokespeople for advocacy organizations that represent American expatriate interests – as well as many expatriates themselves – have been expressing concern over what they say appears to be a significant lack of awareness among key U.S. lawmakers of how expat taxpayers currently struggle with U.S. tax regulations, based on these lawmakers' comments and testimony during a Senate Finance subcommittee 'Tax Gap' hearing on Tuesday.

Americans resident outside of the U.S. say they are having to "refrain from making certain investments" owing to the "penalizing" U.S. tax it would incur; missing out on overseas business and employment opportunities because of their U.S. tax obligations; and suffering from tax-induced "personal stress" as a result of the way their home country continues to tax them, even though they live abroad, according to some of the just-released findings of a major survey carried out towards the end of last year by SEAT, a Paris-based advocacy organization. 

(...But FATCA not directly to blame)

For more than a decade, American expats have reported finding it difficult to obtain or maintain a non-U.S. bank account while living overseas, usually owing to the banks' reluctance to have to comply with the 2010 tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA. But a new survey confirms something many have also been saying: That even U.S. banks often don't want U.S. expat clients either.

Ronald Ariës, a retired Dutch airline pilot who was born in the U.S. but grew up with his Dutch parents in the Netherlands, has taken his fight to be allowed to keep his Dutch bank account – without being forced to agree to U.S. demands that he acknowledge what it regards as his American citizenship – to the European Parliament, by filing a petition with its Committee on Petitions (PETI).

Some 29 Swiss banks, including UBS, Credit Suisse, Julius Baer and J. Safra Sarasin, have been warned that they have until April 13 to provide the U.S. tax authorities with information on their U.S. account-holders, as part of Switzerland's agreement to comply with the American anti-tax evasion law known as FATCA.

American expats and spokespeople for organizations representing them have been asking questions about the scale of U.S. expat data being forwarded to the U.S. under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, after the latest Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) report of such data revealed that around two thirds of the accounts sent actually fell below the US$50,000 FATCA reporting minimum threshold. 

American households accounting for the top 1% in annual income are managing to avoid significantly more in income taxes than had been previously assumed, a research paper due to be released later today by the Internal Revenue Service and academics will reveal.

The Paris-based Association of Accidental Americans has announced that several of its members have been told that they face the closure of their BNB Paribas Private Bank accounts within two months, as they have failed to provide the bank's officials with a U.S. Social Security Number (SSN), which they don't have. 

A Swiss private bank that is said to be Zurich's oldest has agreed to pay the U.S. Justice Department US$22 million, in return for avoiding prosecution on grounds that it had helped certain of its American clients to avoid their U.S. tax obligations.

Eleven years ago today, in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Obama signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act into law – buried inside a domestic jobs bill known as the HIRE Act.

There's not much to say about FATCA that we and others didn't last year, when we marked the anti-tax evasion law's 10-year anniversary, as not a lot has changed about it since then.