BERLIN: Until she divulged her husband's financial records to the IRS three years ago, Genette Eysselinck was a proud American, born on an Army base in North Carolina, and living in a small city in southern France. Then, Eysselinck, 66, was trying to comply with U.S. tax law requiring her to provide bank account numbers and balances for her and her spouse – a Belgian citizen – who lay in the hospital recovering from vascular surgery. Once her husband discovered what she had done, he was incensed. "He felt that I had robbed him of his privacy," she recalled. "He said he had no reason to give them that information. He is not an American, he's never lived in America and nowhere in our marriage contract from 1981 did it say that he had to give that information to marry me. So he was not very happy with my giving it over." Ultimately, Eysselinck decided there was only one way to save her marriage – by renouncing her U.S. citizenship. She did so on February 6, 2012. "I've become more and more depressed," she said of her feelings since surrendering her passport. "I went ahead and in a panic decided to renounce my citizenship simply because I had upset my husband so much and he was so ill at the time. "I hope someone, somewhere, sometime will say that this is wrong. You can't just paint all Americans abroad with the same paintbrush as being tax frauds because we're not." Eysselinck is one of hundreds of Americans living overseas who are being hounded by the IRS since it began cracking down on tax evasion three years ago. Stories that used to be few and far between are now a constant concern for organizations like American Citizens Abroad and the Federation of American Women's Clubs Overseas. And it is a problem that will likely worsen as the U.S. Treasury Department moves to construct an automatic exchange of taxpayer information between governments. The effort is mired in questions about the role of banks in policing government policies, the state of data privacy protections for citizens and the limits of American power. "In some cases, the banks have broadened the scope and said it's not just U.S. citizens," said Victoria Ferauge, a member of American Citizens Abroad who lives just outside Paris with her husband and two daughters. "It's just about anybody with a U.S. connection." That means green card holders, those born in the U.S. but who have never lived there, and people married to Americans. Ferauge said she was recently introduced to an "accidental" American whose family moved abroad in the 1930s when she was three — and when she would normally have lost her citizenship for having moved. "All these years she believed she was no longer an American citizen," said Ferauge. "Now her bank believes she may fall under the category of U.S. ‘persons' who they are required to report to the IRS. She has a 98-year-old mother, whose accounts she manages and she's terrified that she's going to get shut out of them." This painful mess ensnaring an increasing number of ordinary people is the result of the U.S. government's response to a dispute with the world's largest private bank, Switzerland's UBS. In a 2009 settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, UBS conceded it had assisted American citizens for nearly a decade in evading taxes by concealing their ownership of bank accounts abroad. The bank agreed to end its American offshore operations and paid a huge fine: $780 million. Since then, the Treasury department has begun enforcing the Report Foreign Banks and Financial Accounts (FBAR) regulations, and Congress passed new legislation in 2010 called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Read the full article on Occupy.com here
