UK National Wanting to Contract in the US

[TykeMerc]

I've noticed that here recently. Applications for current/savings accounts now routinely ask if you're liable to tax in the US (and simply don't allow it).

While it's arguably a bit discriminatory I can understand why the banks would do that, if they get dragged into painful and expensive reporting on their US citizen customers then the accounts aren't worth the pain.

[jjdarg]

The initial estimate for the programme I worked on was £300M for the implementation alone (it got knocked back by the board because "surely the Yanks can't be serious" and a "lite" approach was adopted alongside a strategy of lobbying the UK gov to relax data protection rules), and one of the Big 4 estimated it would cost $10/year compliance/maintenance for every account a bank holds, not just those of US persons. And a US Person can be anyone deemed connected to the US no matter how tenuously: spouses of US citizens, children of former citizens, people who may have been born in the US when their parents were working there, the list goes on.

At the risk of getting too political here, if the discrimination was happening to people with connections with a country other than the US, the UK and world press would have been up in arms about it. They do go on about Eritrea (the only other country in the world that taxes citizens abroad), and Canada even ejected the Eritrean embassy over it, but bent over backwards to comply with FATCA.

[jjdarg]

Thanks for the links. I'm beginning to think I may just do a Boris and tell them to get stuffed.

No prob. Good luck with it.