On 20 April 2021 the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing entitled “Combatting Inequality: The Tax Code and Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities.” The Committee indicated that any individual or organization wanting to present their views for inclusion in the hearing record can submit a statement. SEAT has submitted a statement, which can be viewed here.
We encourage you to provide your own feedback by email to Statementsfortherecord@finance.senate.gov. The deadline is soon – 3 May 2021. Here is a template that you can choose to use and edit as you would like.
This is the third time in the past couple of weeks that we have called upon you to make a submission to the Senate Finance Committee. We will soon ask you to make a fourth. It is important that you make a submission each time, in order to do all we can for the Committee, and Congress as a whole, to finally accord to Americans living outside the United States the full attention, concern, and respect to which they are entitled as US citizens.
Living abroad as an American citizen is the worst you can do for your future. Your kids who may never live in the US, are saddled with potential IRS penalties if they don’t file back to the US for their entire lives if they don’t renounce citizenship. As an American abroad who is deeply concerned about how complex it is to file from abroad and how time consuming and costly the financial repercussions are, I urge the US Senate to consider reasonable filing guidelines and implementation of a residency based tax system for all Americans like the rest of the world does. It completely unfair to penalize normal law abiding citizens for not reporting to a country they don’t live in. The stress and impact both financial and emotionally is significant.