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"Accidental" Americans and United States Taxes

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing so-called "Accidental" Americans and the Tax System, the US tax system.  

What is an accidental American? Well it is a term that is loosely defined but basically it is person that has relatively few ties to the United States. They may simply be an American by dint of having been born there or their parents happened to be there at the time that they were born so they have US citizenship but they spend very little time in the United States. 

I deal with a number of these folks every year it seems like. We only see a few of them. Mom and dad were just in the US. They had that particular child in the US. The child does have a US passport by dint of birth in the United States and by dint of that birth, by dint of that citizenship, they have to deal with the American tax system and they may have not been in the US much longer than a couple of weeks after their birth but they are still, strictly speaking, stuck with dealing with the tax obligations associated with their American citizenship.  

So the thing to take away from this video for those folks who are in this position, it is a good idea to contact relevant legal professionals to either ascertain whether or not it's advisable to maintain one citizenship or if it is possible to find a simple streamlined solution to go ahead and keep oneself in proper tax compliance with the United States Tax authorities.

It is also interesting to note that there are people that they may have more ties to the United States but then again drifted away from the United States again. All these kinds of people need to go ahead and sort of ascertain exactly what they want their status to be in the future in order to basically keep themselves in compliance one way or the other, depending on how they want to deal with it, so that they don't run afoul with relevant tax authorities and then have to deal with something that is far more complex than they ever really wanted to deal with. So it is probably a good idea to contact a relevant legal professional and try to get some closure with respect to either dealing with the maintenance of one's tax filings or in certain cases, and citizenship renunciation is something that seriously must be contemplated with great gravity because it is a major step to renounce one's citizenship.  But that being said there are going to be individuals where perhaps they simply have virtually no connection with the United States whatsoever and under those circumstances it may behoove them to go ahead and deal with renouncing their citizenship and all this is going to be dealt with in a case-by-case scenario so this should not be looked at as a trivial matter nor should it be sort of generalized. Everybody's case is going to be different and it is a good idea to seek legal advice in order to ascertain the specifics and the specific options in one's case and one circumstances.