The U.S. Treasury and the IRS on Tuesday issued guidance that they said was aimed at providing "relief to individuals and businesses affected by travel disruptions arising from the COVID-19 emergency".

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has announced that it is now pushing back the deadline for those in so-called Model 1 IGA FATCA jurisdictions to provide their FATCA data for the 2019 tax year to U.S. officials, in response to the global COVID-19 virus disruption. 

A report that more than 1 million U.S. citizens living in states "as far afield as California and Pennsylvania" have been "blocked" from receiving CARES Act stimulus checks, which they seemingly should be entitled to, "because they are married to immigrants who don't have Social Security numbers," has sparked a debate among tax and legal experts in Expatland.

As Americans who have been resident abroad for years know only too well, when the IRS has news for U.S. expats, it's usually not good. However, as the American Expat Financial News Journal and other media organizations reported last month, the U.S. government actually included Americans who are resident overseas among those U.S. citizens who would be potentially eligible to receive a "recovery rebate" check, as part of a US$2.2 trillion bipartisan bill aimed at providing emergency relief to individuals and businesses hit by the coronavirus pandemic lockdown...

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has pushed back the filing and payment deadlines for Americans who live overseas to July 15 – which some observers had actually expected it to do, in recognition of the huge issues many individuals, businesses and the IRS itself are facing as a result of the current coronavirus pandemic. 

Top officials from the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation unit have been meeting this week in Sydney with their counterparts from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and United Kingdom to "review" and "set priorities" in their joint "fight against trans-national tax crime," the IRS has revealed.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service this week undertook what it called a  "globally-coordinated day of action to put a stop to the suspected facilitation of offshore tax evasion", in partnership with the tax authorities of the UK, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands.

In her 2019 Annual Report to Congress, acting National Taxpayer Advocate Bridget Roberts said the U.S. IRS needed to significantly raise its game with respect to the way it carries out its role as the nation's tax collecting agency.

But to "truly transform the organization" – which, she noted in a  five-page preface to this year's NTA report, Congress effectively called on it to do last year when it passed the so-called Taxpayer First Act – the IRS "needs to rethink the way it operates", starting with "a culture shift".

Laura Snyder, as we noted earlier this year, is the sole overseas member of a grass roots volunteer advisory organization known as the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel that works – alongside the office of the National Taxpayer Advocate – to call the IRS's attention to issues that American taxpayers are struggling with, but which the agency for various reasons may have failed to realize were problematic. 

An IRS tax guide published in January of this year and intended for "U.S. citizens and resident aliens who work abroad or who have income earned in foreign countries" contained a major error that has only now come to light, and which "may have caused certain married taxpayers filing separately to fail to file" a tax return that in fact they should have, acting National Taxpayer Advocate Bridget T. Roberts said on Friday.