To the surprise of many businesses and observers across Europe, few of whom had seen it coming, U.S. and European Union officials said today that they had reached a preliminary agreement on a new data privacy deal, to replace the long-standing agreement that had been declared illegal in July, 2020 by the EU Court of Justice.

In July of 2018,members of the European Parliament resoundingly approved a resolution which supported the right of Europe's estimated 300,000 "accidental Americans"  to be allowed to cast off their American citizenship (and thus their taxation by the U.S.) more easily and cheaply than is currently possible under U.S. law. (The vote was 470 to 43, with 26 abstentions.) 

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.

Lawyers and campaigners against the American tax evasion law known as FATCA say that last week's European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling, which struck down the main mechanism used by the EU to protect the personal data of EU citizens when it's transferred to the U.S., represents a potential "game changer" – and could force Europe's courts to revisit the way FATCA compels Europe's banks and financial institutions to pass information on their U.S. citizen and Green Card-holding account-holders to the U.S.