The following transcript was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
At the 2026 US Expats Financial Conference, Brandon Mitchener of Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad joined host Hugo Lesser to discuss the legislative path to residence-based taxation. Speaking from Brussels — and an American abroad for almost 40 years himself — Brandon explained how citizenship-based taxation and FATCA have left ordinary Americans overseas double-taxed and shut out of local banking, and why so many are now renouncing their citizenship.
Hugo: Welcome everyone. We’ll just wait two or three minutes to let as many people as possible join. It’s nice to be here with Brandon this afternoon. Brandon, whereabouts are you today?
Brandon: I’m in Brussels, Belgium today.
Hugo: The weather here in the UK is typically gloomy. How is it over there?
Brandon: I can actually see the sky today, which is rare here as well, especially in the winter months. But today the sun poked through a little bit and it’s been a nice day.
Hugo: I think the UK acts as a kind of barrier for the worst of it. Ireland probably gets the worst of what comes in off the Atlantic, and maybe it’s a little bit better where you are. But you never know.
I’m sure you’ll tell us more in the presentation, but how long have you been involved with Tax Fairness?
Brandon: Since about six months before it launched. I’ve lived overseas for more than 35 years, so I’ve had to go through the motions of all Americans abroad — filling out tax declarations for income that you don’t owe, and nonsense like this. I’ve luckily never had any problems with FATCA or FBAR forms, but one of my sons has had big problems, and that’s actually what got me into this.
It was Fabien Lehagre from the Association of Accidental Americans who inspired me to get involved, after I — in retrospect, possibly stupidly — gave him a €100 donation to his cause at the time, and volunteered to help. He immediately got back to me and said, “Oh, well, we should talk.” And I ended up running the thing. That’s what you get for volunteering.
Hugo: I think I spoke to him many years ago. He’s in France, isn’t he?
Brandon: Yes, he lives near Paris.
Hugo: And is he involved with Tax Fairness as well?
Brandon: He’s on our board. He was sort of the inspiration behind it, and managed to convince many of the board members to join. He remains on the board and is very actively involved.
Hugo: Really interesting. The number of people joining is more or less steady now, so let me read an introduction, and then I’ll hand over.
Brandon: Okay.
Hugo: Hello, and welcome to day four of the 2026 US Expats Financial Conference, sponsored by Expat Focus, Wise, Global Citizen Solutions, and Advanced AI Services.
We have a fantastic schedule for you consisting of 17 sessions over four days, covering multiple aspects of financial information for Americans living abroad, with perspectives from some of the world’s leading experts in their fields. Today is the fourth and final day of the conference, and for this, our first session of the day, I’m delighted to be joined by Brandon Mitchener, who will be discussing the legislative path to residence-based taxation.
Brandon is a Brussels-based journalist and strategic communications consultant. He grew up near Chicago, has lived in Europe for almost 40 years, and is American, Belgian, and French. He is a graduate of Wabash College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He spent the first half of his professional career as a business journalist, and for the past 20 years has led regional communications for APCO Europe, First Solar, and Monsanto, as well as leading a European business association and a small Brussels consulting firm. As a side hustle, he also runs a successful wine-tasting business.
Before we start, please bear in mind that the information presented is for general educational purposes only, and you should always seek your own personalised financial advice. Brandon will be answering your questions at the end of his presentation, so please add them in the Q&A pop-up at the foot of your screen as and when you think of them. We’ll answer them in the order they were asked after the presentation. So without further ado, over to you, Brandon.
Brandon: Thank you very much, Hugo. Just bear with me for a few seconds while I share my screen. There are only eight slides, so I’ll walk you through the legislative road to residence-based taxation, with a bit of background on who we are at Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad, where we’ve been, where we’re going, and above all, where things stand now and how you can help.
Brandon: To begin with — and this is no news to any of you on this webinar, since I’m guessing you’re all Americans or other expats abroad — if you’re American, you’re a particularly unhappy lot, because you’re saddled with double taxation. This is the result of a US policy that we’ll come to in a second.
The upshot is that there are some people in the US Congress who continue to have this crazy idea that the only reason anyone would ever leave the United States is to squirrel their savings away in another country and not let the taxman find it. So this idea that we’re billionaire tax dodgers. All of the research that I’ve ever seen says exactly the opposite. The vast majority of the five million Americans abroad are just normal people who went overseas for life, for family reasons, for work, to study, to retire, because they fell in love — all kinds of perfectly legitimate reasons.
There’s a whole class of Americans overseas whom we call accidental Americans. Those are people who might have been born in the United States to foreign parents, but left when they were young, sometimes still in diapers. The US government still considers them American citizens by birthright citizenship, but they don’t really feel very American and sometimes don’t even speak English. There are also Americans like my own children, who were born in Europe to an American parent, and who become quote-unquote accidental Americans in the sense that they’ve lived almost their entire lives in Europe and have a minimal connection to the States, but are still saddled with all the same reporting requirements that I’ll come to.
So one of the purposes of Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad is to convince people that we’re just normal people who want to live normal lives, and that it’s the abnormal US laws which make that impossible for us.
Brandon: Now, the problem is that the United States, unique among democratic countries on Earth, taxes people on the basis of their global income regardless of where they live. The only other country that does this in a similar way is Eritrea, a dictatorship on the Red Sea, and some would argue that their system is actually nicer to its citizens than American citizenship-based taxation.
This CBT, as we call it for short, goes back to the Civil War. The original purpose of citizenship-based taxation was to prevent people from leaving the country and not having to help foot the bill for the war against the South. Regardless of what you might think about the war against the South, that was a long time ago. But the rule is still there, and American citizens are still taxed worldwide, even if they live overseas and have lived their whole lives overseas.
To add insult to injury, we have some other laws that came into effect along the way. FATCA came into effect around 2010, and that requires the reporting of foreign bank accounts and foreign financial accounts. The original purpose of this was actually sound. It was to prevent tax evasion and money laundering, which doesn’t sound unreasonable. They didn’t want Americans with the resources to put their money in foreign bank accounts and then not report the interest or investment income on those savings.
Many countries in Europe have similar rules, so it isn’t an aberration in itself. What is an aberration is the draconian penalties which the US government reserves the right to apply if you fail to report these accounts — draconian penalties for you, as well as for the foreign financial institutions which don’t snitch on you by saying that they’ve got an American client. I actually have a close friend in Switzerland whose entire job consists of closing the bank accounts of American citizens because of this stupid law.
So citizenship-based taxation, also known as double taxation, is driving record numbers of Americans to renounce their citizenship, which is tragic at a time when the country could really use the opposite. It would be good to keep the population stable one way or the other, and not lose people who wish the country well.
Brandon: The current slide shows some of our board members. I know the names are very hard to read, so I’ll just highlight a couple of them. The main point is that we are 100% focused on one issue: ending citizenship-based taxation, or double taxation, and replacing it with as close as we can get to residence-based taxation. I’ll talk a bit more about that later.
We have representatives on our board from across the political spectrum, and collectively they have decades of experience dealing with these kinds of issues. Our board members include people who are active in Democrats Abroad and Republicans Overseas, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, the Association of Accidental Americans, the National Taxpayers Union, American Women’s Clubs Overseas, the American Association of the Indo-Pacific, and Stop Extraterritorial American Taxation. We rely on their expertise to drive us forward and to advise us on how best to go about doing this.
The main differentiator between Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad and the other organisations indirectly represented on our board is that we have only one topic. Many of the rest are interested in voting issues, Social Security issues, and all kinds of things which are very important if you’re an American abroad. Precisely because they are already working on those, we don’t touch them. We have only one issue, and that is trying to replace citizenship-based taxation with residence-based taxation, or as close to it as we can get.
Brandon: We launched a couple of years ago — I think it was actually 1 July 2024, so we’re less than two years old. In that time, I would humbly say that we’ve been able to accomplish quite a lot, even more than I expected.
First of all, we brought together Republicans Overseas and Democrats Abroad, which — and this is a sign of the lack of bipartisanship in the United States — had literally never spoken to one another. So we introduced the Republican and Democrat tax experts to each other to collaborate on a bipartisan proposal, because we always believed, and still do, that the best path to winning legislative changes in Congress is to have something that can pass with bipartisan support.
We also helped make this a campaign issue, though not single-handedly. Republicans Overseas was very instrumental in convincing President Trump to make a campaign statement to the effect that he would end the double taxation of Americans abroad. At one point he added “once and for all,” which we can only celebrate.
We also hired one of the best firms in Washington for tax matters, Brownstein Hyatt. The people we work with on a daily basis have direct experience working on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. These are the people who write the tax laws of the United States, and they’re working for us on this issue. It’s thanks to them that we’ve been able to accomplish everything that follows on this slide.
We made our case to all the members of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee in the first six months or so of our existence. Then began the very hard work of identifying a member of Congress — in this case Darin LaHood, a Republican from Illinois — who would champion our cause. He worked to take our political proposal and knock it into what is called legislative language: the complex legalese saying that according to paragraph this and subsection that, we’re going to change the laws to make things fair. He introduced his Residence-Based Taxation for Americans Abroad Act at the end of 2024. So again, record time to go from political proposal to an introduced act, within six months.
Over the past year we have signed up a Senate co-sponsor, Senator Todd Young from Indiana, also a Republican. And above all, we’ve spent months and months talking with the Joint Committee on Taxation, which has to analyse any tax-related legislation that will have a revenue impact for the US Treasury. We’ve been working with them to revise and improve the bill, to close loopholes, and to address their questions and feedback. This has been a very thorough, exhausting process, because they’re not just looking at the impact for this year or next year — they’re looking at the next ten years. That means trying to put your finger in the wind and say, “Okay, how are Americans currently overseas going to act, and how might this incentivise people going forward, if it does, to move abroad and take advantage of residence-based taxation?” There are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of variables, and that’s taken them a long time to get their heads around. But the good news is that we’re getting there.
Brandon: So what does the LaHood bill actually do and say? I’ve described this as getting as close to residence-based taxation as we can. We describe it as optional residence-based taxation, because that’s a very important point. It would let Americans end their tax residency for US tax purposes if they want to.
The reason we did this is that there are some countries, including France, which have very favourable bilateral treaties with the United States. They also have a lot of American retirees who may have all of their income in the United States, so they’re perfectly happy to stay subject to the US tax system that they grew up with and lived with their whole lives. They would probably not opt into the new system. But everybody else — and certainly those in countries without a bilateral tax treaty, or with unfavourable tax treaties — would almost certainly want to opt for residence-based taxation.
What that would mean in practice is that we would be taxed the way non-resident aliens are taxed in the United States today, so that you only pay tax on income generated in the United States, whether that’s salary, rental income, or investment income. There the US reserves the right to tax it, because the money is actually generated in the United States.
This would be available to all Americans who have lived overseas for the past five years or more and who are up to date on their US federal tax declarations. If you’re not up to date, you would just have to go through the process of getting up to date, once, and then you would be able to opt in and be free of the system forever. With one exception: US government employees, including military personnel. That makes sense — if your income is entirely from the US government, they don’t want you to opt out of the system, because many of those people do return to the US after their tour abroad.
Another thing we had to address was how to prevent very wealthy people who can afford armies of lawyers from planning their way around this and using it. You could argue that that’s their right, but the government doesn’t like the idea of people moving abroad specifically for the purpose of not paying US taxes, and you can sort of understand where they’re coming from. There is already an exit tax on the US law books, and the LaHood bill would introduce a so-called departure tax, which is quite similar. It would tax people on unrealised capital gains up front, in order to end their US tax residency. It would essentially treat them as if they had sold everything they owned in the United States the day they left the country, in order to get some revenue from the fact that those assets had gained value while the person lived in the United States.
Again, there are exceptions, and I think they’re smart exceptions: qualified pension plans and retirement plans, including foreign pension plans; tax-deferred vehicles like 529 plans and health savings accounts; and primary real estate inside and outside the United States. All those things would be exempt, because the US would be able to tax them later, or has decided that it doesn’t make sense to tax them, as with foreign retirement plans.
Also fantastic for many people: we always talk about double taxation, but one of the most significant burdens for Americans overseas is having to file these FATCA and FBAR forms for their foreign financial accounts, including pension plans, investment accounts, and mortgage accounts. This bill would say that if you opt for residence-based taxation, you’re no longer a US tax subject and therefore these rules don’t apply to you. With that, foreign financial institutions should be perfectly happy to take our money and invest it for us, and to give us loans for houses and other big projects, because we’re no longer considered a US tax subject and they no longer face any risk of US penalties for failing to snitch on us.
Also very important if you have children abroad, or are thinking of having children abroad: any American children born abroad going forward would automatically be assumed to have opted into the new system, which is a very good thing.
Brandon: So where are we now? This slide — we call it our treasure map — shows the winding path we’ve taken from the original political proposal to the draft legislative proposal, and then to feedback from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Right now we’re waiting for the Joint Committee on Taxation to give us what we call a score, or revenue estimate: how much will this bill cost? We tried to bring it as close to revenue neutral as possible. It may still end up costing a bit, but we have every reason to believe that we can convince Congress it’s still the right thing to do, even if it does cost some money — similar to the way the Social Security Fairness Act took care of all the injustices of the windfall elimination provision.
That’s where we stand. We think the revenue estimate could come back literally any day. The legislative texts are ready in Senate language and House language, and could be reintroduced very quickly once we get the JCT score. Then we can begin the business of signing up Democrat co-sponsors in the House and the Senate, adding other sponsors over time — the more the merrier — and lobbying Congress to enact this bill as soon as possible and have the president sign it.
We sincerely hope that this year’s congressional elections will work in our favour, because we will certainly be making the case. There are millions of Americans overseas who vote, and in the increasingly polarised, close elections we see in a lot of places, those votes can be decisive. There’s a lot of evidence to that effect. Americans abroad want to see action, not talk. So it’s much better for somebody going into an election to be able to point to something they’ve just done, having earned our trust and respect, than to say, “Yeah, sure, one day I’ll get around to that. Maybe I’ll help you.”
Brandon: This is my last slide, and it’s just to say that we can never do this ourselves. Everything we have done so far has been thanks to the generosity of many, many people who have given us donations as small as $5 and as large as $25,000. We are 100% donation-funded and volunteer-driven, and we can always use more volunteers and more donations.
We’ve also been very grateful to people who have contributed testimonials, because Representative LaHood has told us this will be instrumental in convincing members of Congress that we are just normal Americans who want to live normal lives under extraordinary circumstances. So we need those testimonials. We keep publishing appeals for more of them on our social media channels, and it really does help. It really does matter. If you haven’t yet given one, please do, because that will help convince Congress that we should be allowed to live normal lives abroad.
Please also follow us on our social media channels. We’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Truth Social. We’ve got a decent following for an organisation that has only been around for a couple of years — better than some of our peers in this space.
With that, I’m done with my remarks. If you do scan the QR code, which I believe Hugo will share afterwards as well, that will take you to the Help Us page referenced at the bottom. There you can volunteer, share your story, or help us in other ways, including donations. So I’ll stop sharing my screen and be happy to try to answer any questions you might have — with the caveat that I am neither an accountant nor a tax lawyer. I studied German literature and international relations, and I’ve learned the tax stuff as I went along.
Hugo: Brandon, thank you very much for that presentation. Really interesting, great detail, but also really understandable for those of us who are not legal experts. To our audience, please drop any questions you may have for Brandon about the legislative path to residence-based taxation in the Q&A pop-up at the foot of the screen.
We’ve got a few there already. Maxine, you mentioned if your Zoom account is in the US — I think that’s maybe a mistype.
Brandon: I don’t think Zoom is a financial account.
Hugo: Exactly. So maybe just clarify that in your question. Moving on, somebody says: “We need to target specific congressmen who sit on the right committees to convince them.” Are you working on that, and how is it going?
Brandon: We are. As I mentioned, our two chief advisors at Brownstein Hyatt have worked personally on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, so they know the people personally. Clearly the two sponsors we already have for the bill sit on those two committees, and we have spent the last two years talking with them. They have spent the last year, or six months depending on the person, very intensively engaged with this issue.
They have talked with a number of their colleagues on those two key tax-writing committees, and with the chairs of both committees, reminding them on a regular basis, as Republicans, that this was a campaign promise of President Trump — to end the double taxation of Americans abroad. So yes, we know the right people, and as I said, when we launched the organisation we made a point of setting up meetings with all of the members of those two key committees, and we’ve circled back to them regularly. As an aside, when we publish our testimonials in our newsletters, those actually get sent to every member of those committees every month. So we are showering them with stories of Americans abroad who suffer under this unfair system.
Hugo: Thank you. Somebody asks: if you renounce US citizenship, do you also give up your US Social Security and other pensions?
Brandon: No. Believe it or not, I’ve actually looked into this myself. There are many non-US citizens who have US Social Security and other pensions, so there is absolutely no risk to those two things.
Now, again, I’m not an accountant. There may be risks to a foreign spouse — I’m aware that there are complications for foreign spouses. For example, if something happens to you and your foreign spouse is the beneficiary on the account, they may not get the same treatment that you did. That’s something you would need to ask an accountant about to be sure, or ask the Social Security Administration or the pension system itself. But generally speaking, no. Unfortunately, thousands of Americans have renounced their citizenship, and they looked into this before they did so.
Hugo: Would you be able to invest in US markets after being recognised as a non-resident American under the bill? I guess that includes whether you could keep your US financial accounts and those types of things.
Brandon: Yes and no, I would say — if you speak German, jein. It’s already difficult for Americans who live abroad to invest directly in the US market because of the US Know Your Customer rules. They don’t like people to open accounts who don’t have a US address and a US billing address. So that’s a catch-22: we can’t invest in Europe because of FATCA, but they don’t want us to invest in the United States either, because of the Know Your Customer rules.
Of course, there are many ways of getting around that, and many people do, but the easiest solution is to find an advisor overseas — there are a few companies that will take Americans’ money, and I guess some of them have already appeared in this series of webinars. You can invest in ETFs, exchange-traded funds, whose underlying assets are American investments, without investing directly in the US stock market. That would be my advice.
If I could just add, although it’s not part of the question: for the exchange rate risk alone, it might be interesting to invest in ETFs in your local currency rather than investing directly in the United States, because the dollar has been going down, and that’s not something you want to see if you’re close to retirement.
Hugo: Thank you. As you say, this has come up in a couple of talks already during the conference. It’s nothing to do with the bill and what you’re proposing — it’s simply that currently, if you’re a non-resident of the US, it’s hard to open those accounts. But there are ways to do it. I think if you work with some of these expat specialist financial advisors, they hold the account, and it’s possible.
Brandon: For example, I’ve got an American investment account that’s managed via Luxembourg, so you can do those things.
Hugo: Maxine has clarified her question: if you have a Wise account, do you need to report it on FATCA or FBAR? Again, this has already come up, and I think the answer yesterday was that it depends on whether you’re holding foreign currency in the Wise account. If you’re only holding US dollars in your Wise account, no; but if you’re holding other currencies in there, yes.
Brandon: I do have a Wise account — shout out to Wise, I love Wise. I think if you have money in dollars, that’s kept in a US dollar account, and if you have money in euros, for example, that’s kept in a euro account. The simple thing is that if you keep less than $10,000 in the foreign currency account, you won’t have to report it anyway, because I think that’s the threshold for FATCA and FBAR reporting.
Hugo: That’s correct, yes. So, other than the effects on tax revenue, what kind of objections to residence-based taxation have you heard from members of Congress?
Brandon: That’s a very interesting question, thank you for that, Claude. As I said, it still mystifies me, but there are some members of Congress who remain convinced that the only reason any God-fearing American would ever want to leave the country is to evade taxes. There have unfortunately also been a couple of famous cases of very wealthy Americans, I think billionaires, who skipped the country and thumbed their nose at the IRS. It was very unhelpful, and I think we’re all paying the price for those kinds of actions now.
There’s a lot of ignorance. Even Representative LaHood said this on a webinar late last year: there is a lot of ignorance in the US Congress about why Americans are overseas, how many Americans are overseas, and what we do overseas. I think we have a lot of work to do just explaining to them that we’re normal people.
We have a fact sheet, which you can find on our website, which says that according to the latest statistics, 77% of Americans abroad have adjusted gross income of less than $100,000, which is less than the foreign earned income exclusion. So we would never have to pay US taxes under any stretch of the imagination. It’s just silly to make us go through all these motions and run up huge accounting fees to prove to the US that we don’t actually owe any taxes. That’s the main thing — I think our biggest enemy is ignorance.
There are also people who, with the best of intentions, voted for FATCA, and many of them may still be in Congress, I don’t know, to be honest. There are people who are legitimately concerned about money laundering and tax evasion. They don’t want Americans to put many millions of dollars into Swiss bank accounts, as has happened, with the aiding and abetting of those Swiss banks in that case, and then not report the income generated by those assets to the US government. But those were people living in the United States. It wasn’t Americans abroad.
What’s happened, I think, is that all of those laws, which were made with the best of intentions and were intended to capture Americans living in the United States, have done a huge disservice to Americans living outside the United States. The pain and suffering is so great that thousands of people who would otherwise be patriotic Americans, with their entire families living in the US, would renounce their citizenship. That is a dramatic and tragic act, and it’s caused entirely by FATCA.
Hugo: Have you heard of any moves to change or rescind FATCA? I suppose FATCA has the effect of preventing some foreign banks from working with Americans, and those sorts of things, and I don’t think that would be addressed by the bill you described.
Brandon: It would, actually. There’s just one line on my slides which says that FATCA and FBAR are both covered by the draft bill. Of course, once it’s reintroduced, all kinds of things can happen with amendments — we don’t have total control over that. But as drafted, the bill would end the obligation of Americans who opt for residence-based taxation to file FATCA and FBAR forms.
Very importantly, and this wasn’t in my slides, they would get a so-called certificate of non-residency from the US government, which they could present to foreign financial institutions saying, “Yes, I’m American, but I am not a US tax resident, therefore you can do business with me.” That’s instrumental to us, because even though we talk about double taxation all the time, it’s FATCA which actually causes the lion’s share of our problems.
Hugo: And along with that, there’d have to be some new instructions to foreign financial institutions to accept that.
Brandon: Yes. There’s another line in the bill which would not just gently invite foreign financial institutions to accept it — it would ban them from refusing the business of Americans who have opted for residence-based taxation. So it would be the exact opposite of the current situation, where they’re punished if they don’t report Americans. In the future, if those Americans have opted for residence-based taxation, the foreign financial institutions would be punished for not taking our money.
Hugo: Is LaHood up for re-election at some point?
Brandon: Well, he’s a member of Congress, so every member of the House of Representatives is up for election every two years, including this year. The Senate is every six years. I’m not exactly sure when Todd Young is next up for election, but senators have six years and representatives only have two.
Hugo: I’m just wondering how it would affect the bill if he weren’t re-elected. Are you confident he will be?
Brandon: That’s a good question, and it’s one more reason to have as many co-sponsors as we can. Right now we are confident that he will be re-elected, as will Senator Young — they’re both doing a good job. But we want to have Democratic co-sponsors on board as well, if possible.
Hugo: Thank you. Andrea asks: how would it affect tax treaties?
Brandon: This should have no major effect on the tax treaties. There is a line in the draft bill that says the so-called savings clause in these tax treaties would not apply in our cases. So if you have benefits from a bilateral treaty, those benefits would remain even if you opt for residence-based taxation. Again, I’m not an accountant, and honestly, I pay accountants because I don’t fully understand all of this stuff myself. But the upshot is that you needn’t worry about that: if you opt for residence-based taxation, any benefits you already get under the treaties would continue.
Hugo: It’s complicated, isn’t it? I know about savings clauses, which essentially say that the rest of the treaty doesn’t apply if you’re a US citizen. So you’re disapplying something that’s disapplying the treaties.
Brandon: It’s very convoluted.
Hugo: Yes. Somebody says: US banks say no investment accounts unless you’re living in the US for six months each year, and UK banks and savings companies say you cannot save abroad. I think that’s what you mentioned — you can be stuck between the two.
Brandon: We have received many, many testimonials from people saying exactly this. Whether you’re in the UK, Belgium, Germany, or Japan, it doesn’t matter. Many local institutions don’t want you investing in the United States, and on the other hand they don’t want to take your money either, because you’re an American citizen.
Some people get around this by putting things in the name of a foreign spouse, which, if you love your partner and are sure that’s your future, may work. But given the divorce rate in most countries these days, it’s a risky decision. Many people who write to us agonise over this. Some are in the middle of a divorce and say, “Well, all the money is in my husband’s account,” or “All the money’s in my wife’s account.” It’s not a good place to be if divorce is the way to living a happy, normal life. So the bill would address this by making it possible for Americans to invest abroad. Whether it would make it any easier for them to invest in the United States is another question altogether. I don’t know.
Hugo: As you mentioned, there are workarounds for those, and we’ve seen a couple of firms as part of this conference that can help American expats who are looking to invest. So, is the president aware of the bill, and does he support it?
Brandon: That’s an excellent question. We looked at this very closely, because of course I’m doing this pro bono — I don’t get paid a cent for all the time that I put into this campaign, and neither do any of the other volunteers. The reason this was not included as part of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill is that it has an effect on Social Security. There’s a rule in Congress called the Byrd Rule, after former Senator Byrd, which says that anything which has an effect on Social Security cannot be part of a reconciliation bill.
We did explore it, and I’m not ruling it out, but we could not accomplish all of the things we want to accomplish if we had to take the quick and dirty route of attaching something to a reconciliation bill. Maybe we would have solved the problem for 10% or 15% of Americans abroad, but certainly not for all Americans abroad, which is our hope and intention.
Sorry to interrupt, but there is talk of potentially another reconciliation bill. For the same reason, don’t get too excited about us being part of it. We will look at it again, and if that is our best hope of getting something done, we may try — and then have another bite at the apple later with another bill. But the goal and intention from the beginning has been to have one bill, with bipartisan support, that would solve almost all the tax and financial issues of Americans abroad.
Hugo: Thank you. Mr Farid asks: if I were to organise a wealthy group of expats, potential contributors, would you meet with them?
Brandon: Certainly. I’d be very happy to do that. Fundraising is one of our biggest challenges. As I mentioned, we’ve been very grateful for the support of many people over the last two years, but it is a constant challenge. We do not have a long runway of funding to keep us going in Washington. So far we’ve only been liaising with a couple of offices in Congress — imagine that we need to start reaching out to every member of Congress. That requires resources. We’ll always do the best we can with what we’ve got, but if what we’ve got is very little, then the best we can do will not be as good. So yes, please.
Hugo: And the way to contact you is through taxfairnessabroad.org?
Brandon: There’s a contact page on the website, or you can just email [email protected]. Send an email there and we’ll get it.
Hugo: Back to tax treaties, just to clarify this again. I think the fundamental point in this question is: if you opt in, are you no longer going to be able to benefit from tax treaty provisions? But I think that’s not the case, from what you said.
Brandon: No, it’s not the case. There’s a provision in the bill that says you continue to benefit from all the treaty provisions. So let’s take the example of France, where there’s a very favourable bilateral treaty from the perspective of Americans. They would continue to benefit from all of those terms — they wouldn’t be affected at all. But if they don’t opt in, then they could continue to have problems with bank accounts, for example, because making FATCA go away requires you to have this certificate of non-residency, and that requires you to opt into residence-based taxation. So you need to decide what’s more important: the local bank and financial accounts, or ending double taxation.
Hugo: There’s a question about Interactive Brokers specifically, which provides 1099s and other tax documents for filing, particularly useful for US returns. Would this be counted as US-based income? I think it probably depends where the Interactive Brokers account is — if it’s in the US, then I imagine it would.
Brandon: Honestly, I’ve heard of Interactive Brokers, but I don’t have an account with them, so I have no first-hand experience. My guess, purely a guess, again from a non-accountant and non-lawyer, is that it would be subject to the jurisdiction of the country where you have the account. In Europe, for example, it’s Interactive Brokers Ireland. You’re always subject to the taxes in the place where you live, so if I live in the EU and I’ve got an account with them, I’m still subject to taxes in Belgium.
Hugo: So that wouldn’t create a problem. If you’d opted out as a non-resident, in the scenario the bill envisages, then having an account in Ireland wouldn’t count as US source income, and it wouldn’t require US tax returns being filed. Whereas if you had accounts in the US, potentially it would, if you had income in the US.
Brandon: Well, that said, the US investment may be subject to withholding at source. There’s a 30% withholding tax, as I understand it, on investments like that. So maybe you wouldn’t have to deal with the paperwork, but Interactive Brokers would, if those investments are taxed at source. They would deduct whatever US taxes are owed, put that in the statement to you, and report it to the US government. Then you would make it good through your local tax declaration, saying, “I’ve paid these taxes in the US, I want a credit for them in the country I live in.” That’s the principle of the foreign tax credit, which works both ways.
Hugo: Thank you. Somebody asks what timing you expect for the bill.
Brandon: Again, any day now. We’ve unfortunately been saying that for months, and we’re not holding our breath anymore. But what I can tell you is that when we first began this process with the Joint Committee on Taxation, we were told that the longest discussion had ever lasted about six weeks. It’s been more than six months now. These discussions started after the reconciliation bill got out of the way last July or August. The two congressional offices we’re working with have had multiple meetings with the Joint Committee on Taxation — long meetings, frequent meetings, weekly meetings.
There are no more questions coming, so the Joint Committee on Taxation is now just crunching the numbers. They have access to all IRS data, which we don’t have and which other members of Congress don’t have. So they are crunching numbers to try to come up with this famous revenue estimate, sometimes called the score, in order to inform the legislation. On the basis of that score, we may want to tweak a lever here or there in the bill in order to raise a little more revenue or reduce the cost a bit more, to make it palatable to the majority of members in Congress. So the simple answer is: any day now. I would hope it happens next week. It may take two or three. We’ve had government shutdowns come in between as well. You never know. But I honestly believe this should come very soon.
Hugo: The question of revenue neutrality is an interesting one. Is there an expected loss of revenue from this, and how would that be compensated for? How do you achieve revenue neutrality?
Brandon: That’s an excellent question. In the original political proposal that Tax Fairness for Americans Abroad put together, we had a means for the bill to actually raise revenue. We were trying to remove any hurdles or obstacles to its passage by having it be a money earner. But the mechanism we suggested for doing that was immediately dismissed as being too complicated — we’d have to make changes all over the tax code in order for that to happen.
So right now the biggest levers we can use relate to this departure tax. For example, if they’re worried about billionaires going overseas, moving to Monaco or Dubai or wherever else they get favourable tax treatment, and no longer paying US taxes, you can move the level at which this departure tax is triggered. Our initial proposal said $10 million — no, it was actually $14.83 million. It was the same level as the US estate tax, because we didn’t want to just invent a number. We said, “Let’s take the number which is already there in the US tax code and use the same number.” Where that number ends up is a function of the score, and I don’t know the final number. We won’t know it until the bill is reintroduced.
Hugo: Really interesting. Has there been an estimate yet of the loss that you would need to compensate for with that lever?
Brandon: One of our board members, Doris Speer, who runs AARO, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, is on our board, and AARO has done a revenue estimate. I believe American Citizens Abroad has also done one. Because we’re looking at a ten-year tax window, the estimates do run into the billions of dollars. That sounds like a lot of money to me, and to normal people with normal lives. But when you’re talking about a trillion-dollar deficit, a billion is everyday math for people in Congress.
The way I like to frame this is that sometimes Congress should do things that are the right thing to do, even if they cost a bit of money. The example I gave was the Social Security Fairness Act, the law that repealed the windfall elimination provision. If you’re not an expert on that, for an American abroad it meant a penalty for collecting US Social Security if you already collected any foreign social security. That’s unfair — you paid into two systems, so why shouldn’t you get your full return on investment in two systems? This law corrected that, and it cost the US Treasury billions of dollars, and Congress decided to do it anyway, Republicans and Democrats. So we’re going to try to sell this the same way. If it’s going to cost a couple of billion a year, but it’s going to prevent patriotic Americans from renouncing their citizenship out of anger and frustration, then it’s the right thing to do.
Hugo: Really interesting. Somebody else asks what countries may end up on a list of tax havens, but I think that’s not relevant to the bill.
Brandon: I don’t really know. There’s already a list of countries that are tax havens, and the IRS is already scrutinising them, so I don’t think this will change anything there.
Hugo: Somebody makes the point that forcing foreign banks to accept Americans who’d opted for residence-based taxation would leave those who haven’t with problems opening an account. But that’s already the case — many Americans living abroad struggle to open an account. So I don’t think the bill would change that situation. It would just alleviate it for those who did opt in.
Brandon: I think Claude is hinting at something I said before. Imagine, just to pick on France again, that you’re living in France and you decide not to opt for residence-based taxation. Then FATCA does not go away, and you remain subject to FATCA and FBAR declarations, as does the financial institution that takes your money. Whereas if you do opt for residence-based taxation, then you pay your taxes in France, which may or may not be a good thing depending on where you make your money and how much you make. But you would be able to invest that money in France, because you’re no longer subject to FATCA. And again, if this provision remains in the bill, which we sincerely hope it will, foreign financial institutions would be banned from discriminating against American citizens who are no longer US tax subjects.
Hugo: Really interesting. For a French resident, if you opt for residence-based taxation, would you still benefit from paying US tax rates on US accounts? I guess if you had US source income, you’d still pay US taxes at those rates.
Brandon: US-sourced income would still be covered by the bill. Depending on how this is handled in the final version — and that may be one of the things they’re discussing with the Joint Committee on Taxation — either the US government would impose a withholding tax, let’s say a flat 30% on all revenue coming from US investments, or you would have a simplified form for reporting, similar to the form used by non-resident aliens today. So not the full set of forms for PFICs and FATCA and FBAR: you would have a simplified procedure to report a modest amount of US source income. I don’t really have a strong opinion, but the withholding tax seems like it would be the easier thing. Just let them take their cut and don’t be bothered.
Hugo: And you’d still be able to claim foreign tax credits and so on.
Brandon: Yes.
Hugo: Here’s another: if I don’t pay any income tax in the UK as a freelance artist, now retired with almost zero income, and I change residency from the US to the UK, would I have to register for income tax in the UK?
Brandon: I think that’s a question for the UK. I can’t advise on UK tax law, but I would think yes.
Hugo: If you live in the UK.
Brandon: If you live in the UK, you’re a UK tax subject, and probably always have been.
Hugo: Somebody says, “Thank you very much, please keep us updated.” So to stay updated, do you have a newsletter or something we could all sign up for?
Brandon: We have a newsletter. I believe there’s a newsletter sign-up at the bottom of our homepage. If you go to taxfairnessabroad.org, there’s a window at the bottom where you can sign up. We don’t spam people — it’s one newsletter a month, that’s all we send. We’re much more active on social media, but our newsletter is just once a month.
Hugo: Here’s an interesting question. Imagine you move abroad for a few years and then move back. Would you opt out while you were abroad and then opt back in? How often could you change your mind? It may be advantageous at certain times.
Brandon: There’s no limitation on that. We actually did think of all this stuff, and there is a provision in the bill that accounts for people who move overseas for a while, think they’re going to stay, and then for whatever reason — maybe an ailing parent in the US — decide to move back for a while, and then go back overseas again.
I think the answer to your first question is that in order to qualify for this, you need to have lived abroad for three of the last five years and be up to date on your taxes for the last five years. Those are the two triggers. Then, if you’re not a millionaire — let’s say you don’t have many millions and trigger this departure tax — there is no departure tax, so you’ve just switched from citizenship-based taxation, or double taxation, to residence-based taxation wherever you decide to settle. If you move back to the US, then immediately you become a US tax resident, for the duration of the time that you’re in the US. When you move back overseas, the three-year waiting period begins again: three of the five years you need to stay overseas in order to reapply, or re-opt, for residence-based taxation.
Hugo: So it’s not something you can do the moment you move abroad. You do have three years.
Brandon: Yes. And maybe just the answer to the second part: if you are a millionaire and you did have to pay the departure tax, then as I understand it, when you go back to the US you would get a credit for the tax you’ve already paid, such that you’re not taxed twice on the same income.
Hugo: That makes sense.
Brandon: The system is designed to be flexible.
Hugo: I can see it’s well-designed, and some of these questions show just how complex it is, how many repercussions there can be, and how much detail there is. A couple of final questions, as we’re just coming up to the hour. Is it possible that if this bill passes, tax treaties may need to be renegotiated?
Brandon: Probably not. I can’t really say, but I don’t think it would, because there are already very different tax treaties around the world — some countries don’t have any tax treaty, others do. And they take forever to negotiate, so I don’t think that’s a high priority right now.
Hugo: Just to clarify, if somebody went abroad for a two or three-year assignment for work, it wouldn’t apply to them. It’s for long-term tax residents, so more than three years.
Brandon: No, it wouldn’t.
Hugo: And finally, when calculating assets for the departure tax, presumably that would be worldwide, because the US taxes worldwide.
Brandon: No, as I said, there are certain classes of assets — pension accounts, primary real estate, 529 plans, and health savings accounts — and all those kinds of things would be excluded from the total assets used to calculate the departure tax. The departure tax is really for people with a lot of cash, or things that can be sold quickly. And if you’ve got things which can’t be sold quickly, like a Rembrandt or a Renoir, then there’s a way of dealing with that as well.
Hugo: Well, thank you very much, Brandon. Excellent presentation. And thank you to our audience — fantastic questions. I think we’ve covered a lot. If you have more questions, reach out to Brandon and the team at taxfairnessabroad.org. Support them, and you can find more details on the website.
Our next session is What US Expats Need to Know About Crypto in 2026, and that starts in exactly an hour’s time. So if you haven’t already, register at usexpatconference.com. For now, thank you very much, Brandon, and thank you everyone for joining us. I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Brandon: Thank you, Hugo, and thank you everybody for the great questions.