Americans Abroad

I believe that you mean FATCA rather than FACTA. https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Corporations/Foreign-Account-Tax-Compliance-Act-FATCA It is the one for which the magic number is higher.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act

FATCA is the revenue-raising portion of the 2010 jobs stimulus bill and is thus a good thing, IMO.

FBAR is the one that applies uniquely to bank accounts and applies when the aggregate total of foreign bank accounts is >USD 10,000. https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Report-of-Foreign-Bank-and-Financial-Accounts-FBAR

FBAR is no big deal, IMO. It's just a report that can be filled out on-line, printed, signed and sent to the IRS. It takes a few minutes and certainly does not require a tax accountant. I've done my own for years.

Now that I am a retiree, I have no financial assets abroad that >USD 50,000. My major financial accounts are held in the US, so the IRS already knows everything that there is to know.

When I first moved to Switzerland in 1994, I became a client of then-SBS (now UBS), which is an international bank with an international as well as local clientele. UBS was one of the notorious ones that got caught for helping US citizens (here and in the US, btw) to hide their financial assets from IRS scrutiny and got its fingers badly burned. (I never had enough financial assets to be involved in any of this skulduggery, LOL.) However, what UBS has done since then is to combine its US expat clientele for administration directly from its head office in Zurich so that it meets all of its tax treaty obligations for IRS purposes.

The problems caused by FATCA are not with the major international banks, at least not in Switzerland, but rather with the smaller cantonal banks. They don't generally have the resources to ensure that they will be in compliance with US reporting requirements and thus take the path of least resistance. So yes, the cantonal banks as a rule refuse US nationals as clients based on nationality alone. And yes, I know personally ex-US citizens who have specifically repudiated their US nationality for that reason. However, they would likely not have had the same result with one of the big internationals such as UBS or Credit Suisse, which have branches all over the country - and the world.

No one should necessarily condemn anyone out of hand for their actions, IMO. In most cases I know, the individuals were US citizens by birth who had spent the majority - if not all - of their lives living outside the US, had few, if any, ties there, and had a second nationality.

IMO, FBAR is not a prob at all - just a few minutes spent on line after verifying the highest account balance(s) during the tax year. FATCA does not apply to me at all.