THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The Accidental Americans Association (AAA) is making legal applications in the French courts regarding FATCA, a US tax law that affects expats’ banking arrangements.
AAA filed an application August 19 requesting a judicial review before France's Conseil d'État, the country's supreme administrative court. It also applied for an interim suspension against the refusal issued on 19 June by the French Minister for the Economy, Roland Lescure, to suspend the transfers of banking data carried out by the French tax administration to its US counterpart under the FATCA agreement of November 14, 2013.
Questions about the compatibility of FATCA transfers with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Charter of Fundamental Rights are also being considered by the Belgian Market Court. Its judgment will bind all EU Member States, France included.
FATCA (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) is a 2010 US law that requires banks in countries worldwide to report to the US tax authorities details of accounts held by US citizens, even those who have never lived in those countries. Among these people are so-called "accidental Americans", citizens of other countries who also hold US nationality solely by reason of their place of birth. AAA, which is active in France and at European level, describes itself as defending people who are treated as US taxpayers solely by reason of their place of birth.
AAA has long contested the compatibility of FATCA bank data transfers with European law, and has brought the matter before the Conseil d'État twice. The present action is deliberately narrower in scope: it seeks neither the end of FATCA nor the termination of the agreement, but only a temporary suspension, limited to the time required to examine the case currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union. The French court must now rule on the suspension, but if it fails to do so before 30 September, the annual FATCA data transfer will already have been carried out.
AAA President Fabien Lehagre explained, "In 2019, these transfers were upheld on the basis, among others, that the data could be used only for tax purposes. That is no longer the case. We are not asking the government to settle the legal debate, but to wait for the Court of Justice to settle it, rather than letting the data of more than 40,000 people leave with no possibility of turning back."
