“The federal government's campaign to track down money held by U.S. taxpayers in foreign countries . . . (began) July 1, 2014. That is when the main provisions of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, known as Fatca, came into force. The law . . . is pushing tens of thousands of foreign banks and other financial institutions to disclose information about U.S. customers. It will make life more complex and expensive for many U.S. taxpayers with financial ties abroad, affecting everything from retirement savings to investments to divorce settlements. Fatca is an ambitious effort to root out wealthy U.S. taxpayers hiding money offshore and put an end to tax evasion as a profitable line of business for banks” (June 20th 2014 Wall Street Journal).
However, if one does not want to go through all of the worry and filing of Fatca, there are other somewhat dubious ways of dealing with the Fatca problem. Suppose a U.S. Citizen living in the Philippines is primarily interested in just filing his/her own tax return and has little or no interest in how tax laws affect banks or large corporations. Fatca still requires non U.S. owned banks to file the amount of U.S. funds for each and every U. S. citizen account held by an American and the banks can be punished if they don’t follow the American Internal Revenue Service guidelines. If the bank refuses then it will have great difficulty working with any banks in the U.S. Consequently, thousands of banks located worldwide now file with Fatca the amount of funds held by U.S. citizens. However, there are a small number of banks that refuse to do this. As an example, Canadian Direct Financial, a subsidiary of Edmonton’s Canadian Western Bank refuses to do so but has some restrictions. It will not hold the funds of an American. If a new client is not an American say a Filipino girlfriend, then she can place funds in Canadian Direct Financial, the online bank, for Canadian Western Bank. Then she can send the funds to her account in a Philippine bank. Then she can provide funds to her American husband/boyfriend in cash or into his Filipino account making sure the bank never obtains his Social Security number. All of the banks in the Philippines supply information on American financial dealings to Fatca but they are unconcerned with Philippine citizen account holders. But suppose an American, without a compliant girlfriend, would like to keep his banking somewhat private and not have his financial affairs exposed to Fatca, what can the person do? One option would be to contact GWS (
http://gws-offshore.com/) that deals specifically in helping individuals and corporations to ensure their financial dealings are kept confidential. As an example it will set up a very private corporation in the Marshall Islands for less than $1400 U.S. with a small yearly charge. Money could easily be moved into this XYZ corporation and just as easily be moved out. By doing this a person doesn’t have to go through the immense amount of administrative work involved with a Fatca filing. My advice, for whatever it is worth, is to contact whoever does your legal work to determine whether such an activity is questionable or it is downright illegal before proceeding to do so.
Also, following is a report that may be helpful on your foreign income filing: US Taxes Abroad for Dummies (update) - American Citizens ... <https://americansabroad.org/issues/taxation/us-taxes-abroad-dummies/>
