Tag Archives: Jacob Lew

Tax Haven or Tax Heaven 9: US Treasury Secretary Lew claims USA is a leader in information exchange!

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What follows is Secretary Lew’s rather extraordinary statement. One gets the impression that he lives in a world where, the United States is simply a wise “sage” or perhaps “adviser”, for the rest of the world. In any event, the United States is (as demonstrated by Secretary Lew) clearly NOT required to live by the rules that it wishes to impose on other nations.

In fairness the following excerpt should be read in context. That said the Secretary included the following rather fantastic and incorrect claim – a clear distortion of reality:

“We fully support the call for all countries to automatically exchange financial account information.  The United States led the world in automatic exchange with the enactment of FATCA in 2010.”

What he means that he supports the call for countries other than the United States to provide financial account information to the United States.

As you know:

  1. By the express terms of the FATCA IGAs, the United States is NOT obligated to exchange FATCA  account information of significance with other nations. The exchange on the part of the USA is “aspirational” only.
  2. If there were exchange, the exchange would NOT include “identical information”. It would include “equivalent” information. Presumably “equivalent” information would NOT be identical information
  3. The United States has refused to embrace the OECD Common Reporting Standard.

Here is the Canada U.S. FATCA IGA:
FATCA-eng
To understand why the FATCA IGA’s do NOT obligate the United States to exchange information of significance, read here.
What follows is Secretary Lew’s “statement” in its entirety.
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