SEAT is pleased to report that on September 22, 2025, SEAT Members John Richardson, Laura Snyder, and Karen Alpert published “A Simple And Unilateral Treaty Fix For Citizenship Taxation.” In this article SEAT continues to explore ways to mitigate the problems of citizenship taxation in the absence of legislation.
2020 – “A Simple Regulatory Fix To Citizenship Taxation”
Our 2020 article described how Treasury, through the use of its regulatory power could provide a “fix” for many of the problems of citizenship taxation. This would require going through the regulatory process.
Our 2020 article “A Simple Regulatory Fix For Citizenship Taxation“, discussed with Tax Notes author Robert Goulder here:
2025 – “A Simple and Unilateral Treaty Fix for Citizenship Taxation”
Our 2025 article describes how many of the same problems impacting Americans abroad could be fixed unilaterally by Treasury using U.S. tax treaties. Treasury could simply refrain from using the “saving clause” to deny U.S. citizens the benefits of the treaty. By refraining from using the “saving clause”, Treasury would allow U.S. citizens to have the benefits of tax treaties (which they are currently denied by the “saving clause”). To put it another way:
The tax treaty “saving clause” (if used) denies Americans abroad the opportunity to be taxed as “nonresidents”.
The tax treaty “saving clause” is an option afforded to Treasury and does not have to be used to prevent Americans abroad from being taxed as nonresidents.
Significantly, this would allow U.S. citizens (giving them the same rights as Green Card holders) to elect nonresident status under the residency tie breaker clause found in almost all U.S. tax treaties. The best part is that this could be accomplished by an “Executive Order” which affords President Trump an easy way to fulfill his promise to end the “double taxation” of Americans abroad!
It’s all explained in the article, available here.
A special thanks to Tax Notes for allowing the article to appear on the SEAT site.
