US sanctions against foreign citizens
"Are most big US based financial institutions and banks in such a close relationship with USCIS (United States Citizenship And Immigration Services) so they can easily request the information about market traders? Yes. They must be in order to enforce the laws required by the sanctions. What online broker would you suggest that probably won't focus on that dual citizenship matter? ""Dual"" citizenship isn't actually relevant here. Nearly anyone in the world can invest in US banks except for those few countries that the US has imposed sanctions against. Since you are a citizen of one of those countries, you are ineligible to participate. The fact that you are also a US citizen isn't relevant in this case. I believe the reasoning behind this is that the US doesn't encourage dual citizenship: The U.S. Government does not encourage dual nationality. While recognizing the existence of dual nationality and permitting Americans to have other nationalities, the U.S. Government also recognizes the problems which it may cause. Claims of other countries upon U.S. dual-nationals often place them in situations where their obligations to one country are in conflict with the laws of the other. In addition, their dual nationality may hamper efforts of the U.S. Government to provide consular protection to them when they are abroad, especially when they are in the country of their second nationality. If I had to guess, I'd say the thinking there is that if you (and enough other people that are citizens of that country) want to participate in something in the US that sanctions forbid, you (collectively) could try to persuade that country's government to change its actions so that the sanctions are lifted. Alternatively, you could renounce your citizenship in the other country. Either of those actions would help further the cause that the US perceives to be correct. What it basically boils down to is that even though you are a US citizen, your rights can be limited due to having another citizenship in a country that is not favorable in the current political climate. Thus there are pros and cons to having dual citizenship." "US Sanctions are usually very nuanced and you should look them up yourself.  It may be widely reported that ""US sanctions X-country"" and it may be widely understood that it means all funds from anybody in that country are blocked, that USUALLY isn't the case (or ""many times"" isn't the case, I'm not going to bother quantifying that) Many times it is a comprehensive list of certain individuals and businesses that are blocked. The US Treasury publishes a list of these organizations. This misinterpretation can trickle down to companies. You would think big financial companies understand regulations, but they typically just react to how things are reported and have no uniform understanding of the financial regulations they are subject to. Private companies create unique and arbitrary company policies in reaction to the spirit of a regulation. So could it be that all Iranians cannot interact with the US financial system? Sure, thats possible. Could it be a lot more nuanced? Sure. Does it matter if the broker will actually investigate your SSN with USCIS? Maybe, maybe not. Does it matter if you disclose you are a dual citizen if they claim they can just check your SSN?  The financial institution is the one liable for misinterpreting sanctions. Let the consequences guide your actions."
"Highlights from Bill Browder's Senate Judiciary Testimony:  &gt;Russia has a well-known reputation for corruption; unfortunately, I discovered that it was far worse than many had thought.  &gt;When Putin was first elected in 2000, he found that the oligarchs had misappropriated much of the president’s power as well. They stole power from him while stealing money from my investors.  &gt;**in July 2003 ... Putin arrested Russia’s biggest oligarch and richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.** After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, **it appeared that Putin’s answer was, “Fifty percent.” He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world**  &amp;nbsp; &gt;**Over 25 Interior Ministry officials barged into my Moscow office and the office of the American law firm that represented me. The officials seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that I advised. I didn’t know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky.** I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had.  &gt;Sergei went out and investigated. **He came back with the most astounding conclusion of corporate identity theft: The documents seized by the Interior Ministry were used to fraudulently re-register our Russian investment holding companies to a man named Viktor Markelova known criminal convicted of manslaughter. After more digging, Sergei discovered that the stolen companies were used by the perpetrators to misappropriate $230 million of taxes that our companies had paid to the Russian government in the previous year.**  &amp;nbsp; &gt;As I thought about it, the murder of Sergei Magnitsky was done to cover up the theft of $230 million from the Russian Treasury. I knew that the people who stole that money wouldn’t keep it in Russia. As easily as they stole the money, it could be stolen from them. These people keep their ill-gotten gains in the West, where property rights and rule of law exist. This led to the idea of freezing their assets and banning their visas here in the West.  &gt;**In 2010, I traveled to Washington and told Sergei Magnitsky’s story to Senators Benjamin Cardin and John McCain. They were both shocked and appalled and proposed a new piece of legislation called The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act.**  &gt;Despite the White House’s desire to reset relations with Russia at the time, this case shined a bright light on the criminality and impunity of the Putin regime and persuaded Congress that something needed to be done. **In November 2012 the Magnitsky Act passed the House of Representatives by 364 to 43 votes and later the Senate 92 to 4 votes. On December 14, 2012, President Obama signed the Sergei Magnitsky Act into law.**  &gt;**Putin was furious. Looking for ways to retaliate against American interests, he settled on the most sadistic and evil option of all: banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American families.**  &amp;nbsp; &gt;**since 2012 it’s emerged that Vladimir Putin was a beneficiary of the stolen $230 million that Sergei Magnitsky exposed.**  &gt;**I estimate that he has accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains from these types of operations over his 17 years in power.** He keeps his money in the West and all of his money in the West is potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation. **Therefore, he has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.**  &gt;**The second reason why Putin reacted so badly to the passage of the Magnitsky Act is that it destroys the promise of impunity he’s given to all of his corrupt officials.**  &gt;**There are approximately ten thousand officials in Russia working for Putin who are given instructions to kill, torture, kidnap, extort money from people, and seize their property. Before the Magnitsky Act, Putin could guarantee them impunity and this system of illegal wealth accumulation worked smoothly.** However, after the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin’s guarantee disappeared. **The Magnitsky Act created real consequences outside of Russia and this created a real problem for Putin and his system of kleptocracy.**  &amp;nbsp; &gt; One of the most shocking attempts took place in the spring and summer of last year when a group of Russians went on a lobbying campaign in Washington to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act by changing the narrative of what had happened to Sergei.  &gt;**Who was this group of Russians acting on behalf of the Russian state? Two men named Pyotr and Denis Katsyv, a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya**, and a large group of American lobbyists, all of whom are described below.  &amp;nbsp; &gt;**Her first step was to set up a fake NGO that would ostensibly promote Russian adoptions, although it quickly became clear that the NGO’s sole purpose was to repeal the Magnitsky Act. This NGO was called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI).**  &gt;**Through HRAGI, Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer naturalised as an American citizen, was hired to lead the Magnitsky repeal effort.**  &amp;nbsp; &gt;**Veselnitskaya also instructed U.S. law firm Baker Hostetler and their Washington, D.C.-based partner Marc Cymrot to lobby members of Congress to support an amendment taking Sergei Magnitsky’s name off the Global Magnitsky Act. Mr. Cymrot was in contact with Paul Behrends, a congressional staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, as part of the anti-Magnitsky lobbying campaign.**  &gt;**Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act.**  &amp;nbsp; &gt;As part of Veselnitskaya’s lobbying, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, was hired to organize the Washington, D.C.-based premiere of a fake documentary about Sergei Magnitsky and myself. This was one the best examples of Putin’s propaganda.  &amp;nbsp; &gt;**On June 13, 2016, they funded a major event at the Newseum to show their fake documentary, inviting representatives of Congress and the State Department to attend.**  &gt;**While they were conducting these operations in Washington, D.C., at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.**  **Cherry On Top:**  **From Trump's Interview with The New York Times.**  &gt;""The meal was going toward dessert,"" Trump said. ""I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. **Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.""**" There's no requirement of US citizenship to open a bank account in the US. Any person, citizen or not, can do that. I don't know where this assumption of yours come from, but it is false. So the easiest solution is to open a bank account for your nephew next time he visits the US and get him an ATM card from that account. You can then deposit money to that account as much as you want (beware of the gift tax consequences). If he doesn't want to travel to the US and cannot open a US bank account remotely from Russia (which is probably the case), then follow the @BrenBarn's suggestion: have him open a bank account in Russia and just wire money there. Having a foreigner tapping freely into your own personal bank account may cause legal issues both with regards to gift tax and money laundering provisions that require you to certify that the money on the account is yours only. Also, check if there's an issue for a Russian resident to have control over foreign accounts (there's definitely such an issue for a US resident, Russians are generally not far behind when it comes to government oppression). Should voters care? What is the scenario in which this debt actually becomes a problem? It seems to me that the money from this debt is largely going into the pockets of US Citizens, so less debt would mean less prosperity for Americans. What are the arguments against this assumption? "Since you did not treat the house as a QBU, you have to use USD as your functional currency.  To calculate capital gains, you need to calculate the USD value at the time of purchase using the exchange rate at the time of purchase and the USD value at the time of sale using the exchange rate at the time of sale.  The capital gain / loss is then the difference between the two.  This link describes it in more detail and provides some references: http://www.maximadvisors.com/2013/06/foreign-residence/ That link also discusses additional potential complications if you have a mortgage on the house. This link gives more detail on the court case referenced in the above link: http://www.uniset.ca/other/cs5/93F3d26.html The court cases references Rev. Rul 54-105.  This link from the IRS has some details from that (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/0303021.pdf): Rev. Rul. 54-105, 1954-1 C.B. 12, states that for purposes of determining   gain, the basis and selling price of property acquired by a U.S. citizen living in a foreign country should be expressed in United States dollars at the rates of exchange prevailing as of the dates of purchase and sale of the property,   respectively. The text of this implies it is for U.S. citizen is living in a foreign country, but the court case makes it clear that it also applies in your scenario (house purchased while living abroad but now residing in the US): Appellants agree that the 453,374 pounds received for their residence should be translated into U.S. dollars at the $1.82 exchange rate prevailing at the date of sale. They argue, however, that the 343,147 pound adjusted cost basis of the residence, consisting of the 297,500 pound purchase price and the 45,647 pounds paid for capital improvements, likewise should be expressed in U.S. dollar terms as of the date of the sale. Appellants correctly state that, viewed “in the foreign currency in which it was transacted,” the purchase generated a 110,227 pound gain as of the date of the sale, which translates to approximately $200,000 at the $1.82 per pound exchange rate. ... However fair and reasonable their argument may be, it amounts to an untenable attempt to convert their “functional currency” from the U.S. dollar to the pound sterling. ... Under I.R.C. § 985(b)(1), use of a functional currency other than the U.S. dollar is restricted to qualified business units (""QBU""s). ... appellants correctly assert that their residence was purchased “for a pound-denominated value” while they were “living and working in a pound-denominated economy,” ... And since appellants concede that the purchase and sale of their residence was not carried out by a QBU, the district court properly rejected their plea to treat the pound as their functional currency." Hmm...this keeps happening, big numbers to you and I - but not so big as a deterrent or anything to stop them in the future. People in China and other countries will lie cheat and steal to move forward and get death sentences, does anyone really think a fraction of the profits fine will change anything? I understand the aggression because the logic permeates into individual income taxes and can really negatively affect lives. I mean I really essentially at some point am being forced to chose between sane financial stability or a feeling of identity of the country I am from. I hate that I'm in that position and I hate the politicians and the people that enable them even more. FATCA passed the Senate with 80 votes. It was part of a jobs bill, so GOP went against it in the House, but they still supported that position. They only changed their tune about that one just last year after allowing both parties to trample all over citizens living abroad. But there's only a few million of us and it's distributed across states, so our votes just don't matter. "I can't tell if you're just very stupid, young, or trolling.  You insist that if we don't like taxes we can just, ""go to Somalia."" WHICH IS NOT TRUE. Even if I did simply want to stop being American and live in Somalia I still have to pay taxes.  If it was totally free to leave you'd have a point - that I'm opting in to being here after the fact by not leaving. But that's just not the case. There is a real cost to leaving and renouncing citizenship and thus there is an aspect of being under duress to this ""agreement"" you claim we make.  Edit: Do you seriously not understand that these are exit taxes that I am talking about and not your regular income/property/whatever taxes?" Completely different. Canadians can be deemed non-residents by severing their residential ties with Canada and emigrating to another country, and no longer required to file unless they have certain sources of Canadian income. *See* http://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad/taxation   No such classifications exist with US citizenship. You file a return no matter what, even if you haven't stepped foot in the US in decades.