FATCA: The (NZ) Officials’ Report –A Crime That Deserves a Revolution.

Opening synopsis and challenge:

To every one of the Left who protested against the GCSB, NSA, PRISM spying trilogy in New Zealand, understand that through the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) between the US and NZ governments’ over FATCA, our government is using the huge powers IRD have to spy and exchange information outside the purview of the Privacy Act, to implement an American spy operation in our shores that has nothing to do with the New Zealand tax-take. If a government can corruptly bypass the rule of law for this, they can do it for anything else, demonstrating why a taxing authority must never be given the powers they have been given in the West; the powers of the full surveillance state.

So, why aren’t you all out protesting? How big a double standard can you personally take with your cult of redistribution?

Truth Telling:

Hundreds of thousands of words in the MSM on Kim Dotcom owning a copy of Mein Kampf, yet our public officials yesterday published  a copy as the manual they’ll be following from 2017, and not a squeak. It’s like Pearl Harbour printed in a half inch byline after the lonely hearts ads.

Think hard on this: did anyone reading this blog think they would live to see the day that middle of the road US citizens would feel their only option to live free lives would be to defect ... from the USA? Well they are now, due to FATCA.

New Zealand tax officials have just confessed, quite casually, the creation of the full, one-world police surveillance state under the auspices, sorry, the outright bullying, of our US masters.

This post will make more sense in the context of my previous one, but in summary the recent Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) privacy debacle demonstrates the single reason for New Zealand's Privacy Act granting some limited protection from ACC and other government departments, but allowing no protection at all against the IRD, must only be justification on the grounds of the sacred New Zealand tax take which is the God the Cult of Redistribution worships at the price of individual rights and the free society. Therefore, the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) between the US and New Zealand governments implementing FATCA, (see below), which cynically uses the IRD’s God-like powers that render our consent null and void, as with our privacy, to an end which is clearly not in pursuance of the New Zealand tax take, but only the US tax take, must logically be corrupt. Every New Zealand politician signing that IGA, to bypass our privacy legislation, should stand down in disgrace.

It cannot be underestimated how important this is. To recap again how the mammoth US FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act which implements the US’s citizenship based tax ) legislation works:

These are the facts spelled out. The supply by New Zealand financial institutions – … including every bank - of the requested information to IRS [on all account holder US citizens in New Zealand] would rightly contravene the most sacrosanct provisions of our privacy legislation. Thus, under a cynical work-around IGA between US and New Zealand governments, which allows them to avoid the political fallout of breaching that privacy legislation and creating second class citizens in New Zealand, these same financial institutions now simply provide that information to the IRD which can legally, albeit immorally, send it to IRS given our privacy provisions do not cover IRD

And:

Our politicians have signed the New Zealand taxpayer up to FATCA which has no benefit, indeed, is a cost, to taxpayers and to every New Zealand bank and financial institution account holder, given the US government is reimbursing no costs to administer ‘their’ law. FATCA was cynically put on us via the privacy law circumventing IGA only to provide the US information on its citizens, and to fund the US tax take, not New Zealand’s. There is absolutely no benefit for New Zealand.

Yesterday IRD Tax Policy published a 310 page document, part of which was the officials’ response to the IGA between NZ and the US, and FATCA, and the submissions made against both by the public. That report becomes a good object lesson to all submitters of what a whitewash such exercises are, and what a sham our statist captured democratic processes have become.  The report proper started at page 112 of the document: it is sadly unsurprising the first 111 pages dealt with what you might have thought was such a simple thing as how employee allowances are to be dealt with (such is the complexity of our taxing legislation). Although I could only make it to page 117 before my eyes were so blurred with tears of fury, and I had no interest in reading on, even in these five pages, look at what this report says about our society, and our world, in 2014.

I said above that FATCA has no benefit to New Zealand.  What an innocent I still am. The first three pages sets up the officials’ premise of why this legislation must be legislated because, quote, ‘it is beneficial to New Zealand’. There is no contradiction here, only the difference in point of view between a man who knows the principles of a free society necessarily based on individualism and individual rights, and government drones who’ll be having none of that nonsense. Tell me why this next bit is not sensational? The officials’ believe this legislation beneficial because:

Without an IGA, in order to avoid FATCA penalties, New Zealand financial institutions would need to enter into separate agreements with the United States’ Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Under these agreements, the financial institutions would need to:

* identify US accounts and report certain information about these accounts to the IRS on an annual basis;

* withhold 30% on payments from the US to a non-participating foreign financial institutions or to a recalcitrant account holder (account holders who have not provided the required information); and

* close the accounts of these recalcitrant account holders.

Officials consider that New Zealand financial institutions would not be able to comply with these agreements under our existing legislative framework. Private details of individuals may be able to be collected and shared if appropriate amendments were made to customers’ terms and conditions. Terms and conditions may also be able to be used to close accounts in appropriate instances. However, it is not clear that a financial institution could ever legally act as a withholding agent for a foreign government. Entering into separate agreements would also impose significant compliance costs on all New Zealand financial institutions.

The only way such agreements could be effected would therefore be for New Zealand to enact specific legislation that allowed financial institutions to comply with their terms.

I’ll summarise soon, but first the killer bit:

In essence, not entering into an IGA and not enacting enabling legislation of some sort would leave New Zealand financial institutions with a choice of:

*  not investing either directly or indirectly into the US (to avoid withholding penalty); or

 * investing in the US and suffering the withholding penalty.

So, the IGA is beneficial to New Zealand only because it lowers the cost and penalties – I said PENALTIES - which the US government will otherwise impose on our local banks and  institutions for failure to implement their tax take.

Think about that: 'to implement their, as in the US government's,  tax take'. Penalising a New Zealand bank for not spying and collecting tax for the US government.

This is sheer US bullying of the highest order. It is US colonisation of its tax surveillance state at the expense and extreme prejudice of its allies and their rights, and their sovereignty. There is no financial benefit to New Zealand of FATCA, only cost as we are having to pay to administer the US government taxing its citizens abroad, most of whom have no plans on living in the US, and the best our politicians can think of is to try and minimise the cost to us. What a joke.  A free country and principled politicians would have declared war against the US for this infamy (truly), or at least asked for reimbursement of costs; circa 2014 our politicians legislate their own people’s rights away to accommodate it, all the while through our own tax take forcing them to pay for it. Win win for Obamamarx. Chamberlain’s sycophantic cowardice has got nothing on the yellow bellies that occupy the sandpit in our Fortress of Legislation.

As I said in the previous post, at least the Canadians are looking to test the legality of the US IRS being able to impose penalties on non-US banks:

As a side note, the Canadians are looking at their legal options over IRS’s assumed ability to impose penalties on non-US banks which don’t comply with FATCA: good on those Canadian politicians. Compare that to our gutless politicians who just signed the dotted line: ask yourself, what right does the US IRS have to penalise our banks, our bank account holders, over a matter that has nothing to do with us, and when we are forced to administer their information bureaus and their tax take at our cost for no benefit? It’s ludicrous.

From this point, the officials report just mimics every other piece of tyrannical literature that has destroyed lives though our modern history.

On privacy it is appalling; the full communist ethic:

Officials accept that, under the IGA, information will be collected and shared which is not currently being collected or shared.

It seems obvious from submissions that many of the individuals concerned do not consider information-sharing in this case to be appropriate. However, government is in the position of having to make such judgements on a national, rather than individual, level. As set out in ―Entering into an IGA‖ section of this report, officials consider that a sound public policy argument exists in this case that justifies New Zealand entering into an IGA – a necessary part of such an action being that the information collection and transmission contemplated in the IGA will occur. The privacy of the individuals concerned was a factor that officials examined in reaching this view, but it was, on balance, deemed to be outweighed by other public-interest considerations.

My highlighting at the end. Stated in cold black and white: the public good outweighs individual rights. For regular readers of this blog, that’s where the penny will drop.

I quote just two of my previous blogs on the tyranny of common good: from TheTyrant’s Call:

… the common good has been the battle cry of almost every tyrant throughout history. The common good has been so important, apparently, that hundreds of millions of individuals over the twentieth century had to be exterminated or killed by the state for it. Rights cannot attach to a collective, when you try to, you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. That same common good is currently being used in Christchurch to usurp private property rights on a breath-taking scale. Just as the common good is used as the excuse to steal the property and effort of productive individuals while making those individuals victims to a department of state with literally the powers of the true Orwellian police state. To be meaningful, and cause no harm through the force of state, rights can and must only attach to individuals. A society must only base itself on protecting the smallest minority: the rights and property of an individual (and especially from the abuse of state).

And – politicians note – from this blog’s most read post, still with hundreds of weekly reads, and growing, despite having been written in 2012, 1984 Comes to2012, talking of how children in the UK were in a school education unit being taught to dob in suspected tax evaders in their neighbourhood (including mum and dad presumably):

Look at the ‘good citizens’ these children are taught to be in our schools, with all these ‘obligations’ to each other. And so strong is the programming, that I am confident more than ninety percent of those reading this would feel, deep down, that they have to agree with the teachers’ ethic here, with what this tax course in the schools is founded on: that self-sacrifice for the common good, is a noble thing, and the needs of others are what social democracies must hold at their centre. This is what New Zealand Socialist commentator, Chris - The Fist - Trotter forces on us.

But it’s a magic trick, an illusion, that’s been done in our minds by Gramsci, a linguistic sleight of hand, all the more evil because it initially appeals to our 'better natures'. All we need do to understand it, see the reality of it, is change the focus, the narrative point of view, and see what it really says, which is that for you to live your life, it is acceptable that the lives of others, total strangers, be sacrificed to you, their pursuit of happiness destroyed for you, and that the state will initiate force to back you up in this, and mince up the livelihoods, and freedom, of those who will not bow down to you. And part of being a good citizen, now, is for you to dob these people in, so they can be dealt to.

Free men know that the civilised society is not based on such an extinguishment of life, but founded on a bed-rock of the non-initiation of force, particularly the state against the people, and on each individual being responsible for themselves, and self-reliant. That a civilised society works on the natural love and affection between families and loved ones, on compassion and charity freely given for strangers, and on voluntarism.

The officials’ document then gets even worse, were it possible. I once thought the one world conspiracy theorists were flakes: apparently they were prophets. In that area of your life where the police state meets your wallet and your rights, tax, FATCA is finally the integrated one-world police state that had previously been working its way out steadily via information sharing double tax agreements:

From a Government perspective, officials also note that FATCA is now part of a major global initiative to combat international tax evasion. FATCA is based on the idea of global automatic exchange of certain information by financial institutions. Previously these information exchanges have occurred either on an ad hoc or ―on request‖ basis, or annually by way of agreement between tax authorities under various double tax treaties.

Automatic exchange of information between multiple jurisdictions is now the new international standard for automatic exchange endorsed by the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Officials consider there would be a severe reputational risk for New Zealand if it were not to be involved in this international movement. All OECD countries have either signed, or are negotiating, IGAs with the United States in respect of FATCA. The OECD itself has dedicated resources to devising a common reporting model for financial accounts, based on the FATCA model. This tax transparency is seen as complementing its base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) work. The BEPS initiative is aimed at ensuring that entities and individuals that operate in numerous jurisdictions pay an appropriate amount of tax. Automatic information exchange and transparency in tax affairs is seen as an important compliance tool for this programme.

Read that again. For every clueless Lefty out protesting the GCSB, NSA and PRISM, that is the full big brother, information swapping, spying, one-world police state. It is Orwell’s Oceania on a global basis in the real world, in the world we live, because a faceless official who can read your financial transactions, can read your life, plus worse, this official owns your income. And you retards, worshipping at the altar of redistribution, created it.

And I’m only on about the fourth page of the report. It’s just full of gems: here’s a lovely piece of doublespeak:

The New Zealand Government should not be funding FATCA.

As set out in the ―Entering into an IGA‖ section of this report, the decision to enter into an IGA is at least in part an attempt to lower compliance costs that would be imposed on financial institutions in any event. It is anticipated that, by centralising some of these costs, the compliance costs on New Zealand as a whole will be reduced.

I don’t have to explain the contradictions inveigled behind every word of that.

Under submitters concerns regarding ‘overreach’ occurs a real concern for all Kiwis married or partnered to someone with a US passport, and to their partners. Ironically, under submitter concerns on overreach it is evident there will be massive amounts of IRD time spent screening the data to be transferred to IRS to ensure Kiwi partners of US citizens privacy is protected by not being sent to the IRS – again, you can’t make this doublespeak bullshit up.

Submitters appear particularly concerned that information on the spouses of ―US persons‖ (where those spouses are not ―US persons‖) will be reported.

[Snip]

 Inland Revenue has established an IT working group with the financial services sector to ensure that only the necessary and correct information is transferred (noting that the first transfer of data to Inland Revenue is not due until about mid 2015).

 Inland Revenue’s proposed technology solution for IGA information will result in data transferred from financial institutions being electronically screened to ensure it complies with minimum requirements. From the 2017 reporting period, one of the required data fields will be the US social security number (called a TIN for tax purposes and essentially an IRD number equivalent) of the relevant person. A person that is not a US taxpayer will not have a social security number. So, even if a financial institution did try to report on a non-US person, the data would be rejected by Inland Revenue systems as being incomplete.

I would point out that an inevitable part of this IRD ‘electronic’ screening process will be IRD officials looking at all these individuals closely, so opening the prospects of many lovely fishing trips for them. It is one of IRD’s stated compliance focuses this year to find all New Zealand tax residents with income being earned in foreign bank accounts: so they’ve just landed a big one. Under FATCA banks now have to report to IRD all US citizens: I bet all names  will then go into an audit function to check out their world-wide affairs from the point of view of the New Zealand tax take. Of course, for IRD, the Lefty and Tory Cult of Redistribution, and in the public interest this will be considered a benefit, and the massive inconvenience and invasion of the private lives of these victims, immaterial: they may well be rich pricks, after all, not human, just that lovely productive group who are captured as the Left’s bank and whose lives don’t otherwise matter. Indeed tax officials and governments the world over will be loving FATCA: it's a sign of how far and fast the West has fallen from a sane classical liberalism and into Big Brother's suffocating bear-hug.


And that's the key to this post, and to FATCA: tax officials that run countries, in the blind pursuit of their job descriptions without regard to the philosophy required for a free society, have for a very long time been wanting FATCA: the global tax surveillance state so massive, so powerful, so complex, that no individual, group or corporation can possibly stand against it without being destroyed, and that the Left liberal majority in the West are fundamentally crippled from protest, because their every belief has sanctioned and called for it. The IGA between the US and New Zealand was never going to be any different to what was first drafted by the new intelligence operations that run the world; the taxing authorities, which now own the financial transactions that narrate the most intimate details of your life, and own your income and your property, in-country and wherever you are on the globe. FATCA is beneficial alright, the officials' got that right, but only to them, not to those of us who thought our birth right in the West were free lives.

Anyway, detoured: so I’m now on only page 117 of the Officials' Report. On and on it goes. To sum up the above, it’s a sickening document directly from the pages of Orwell’s novel 1984. Every damned word of it; and I don’t have the stomach or inclination to carry on. I’ve made my point. Hopefully even one person reading this has finally woken up to the major themes of this blog. If you skim your eye across all submitters concerns in the officials’ report, then pretty much nil, none, zilch, zero submitters concerns have been accepted, almost every concern declined: the whole process was pointless appeasement. Every submitter who thought they were exercising their rights in a democracy, was being cynically used and abused by a bureaucratic tyranny that is bound on the ethic individuals only exist to be sacrificed to the herd; to the hopeless underclass created by generations of dependency to the welfare state where self-reliance is misinterpreted as selfishness and scorned. Some critical mass of our population, and 100% of the staffers in the bureaucracies plus in the Fortress of Legislation, including our cowardly politicians, are useful idiots. As far as the US goes, repeating my previous post, Obama may as well print out the constitution in a roll and sell – what was I thinking, he's no capitalist, give it away – as toilet paper.

Though finally, here’s the amazing thing. This mammoth wrong the US is perpetrating through FATCA, the treason our politicians are doing us through the IGA, the US’s tax surveillance state colonisation of every friendly country on the threat of dire economic penalties to them, this bullying of their friends and allies, and yet how many rights and political philosophy based articles against it printed in our MSM, that same who were all over GCSB, NSA and PRISM?

Fucking NONE. Not even the NBR. Hundreds of thousands of words on Kim Dotcom owning a copy of Mein Kampf, yet our public officials just published a copy as the manual they’ll be following from 2017, and not a squeak. It’s like Pearl Harbour printed in a half inch byline after the lonelyhearts  ads.

Hopeless.

Again, again, again, we are so stuffed: slave societies forced to live in the prisons of each other’s minds, because those minds have been fed on emoting trivia through the state school system and effectively destroyed. There will be no Western Spring, there will be no needed second Revolution in America, until after the new Gulags are filled: and those Gulags have their foundations well built into very firm ground, FATCA going down as a cornerstone, and listen, you can almost hear the drones.


Addendum:

Given this post is being read so 'fast', compared to the previous, two important paragraphs from that post:

And as shown by the non-response by Sacha Dylan, and the pathetic bleating of the Left on Twitter over the ACC privacy issue, it remains important to constantly expose that central, lethal contradiction of the Left, whereby they want their privacy cake, while eating it too. They want their privacy from the state, while promoting a big brother state from which, to meet its ends, an individual must have no privacy: grow up, this is simply not possible. When your central beliefs contain a contradiction this big, you must re-examine your premises.

And:

Because extend this principle out. A New Zealand government didn’t want the political fallout which would come from breaching our privacy legislation, so they used IRD, being immorally above that privacy legislation, as a backdoor for US to spy on its own citizens. If they did this once, why won’t a future government find it convenient to use the Teflon IRD on other issues that might be a bit embarrassing politically? Answer: there’s nothing stopping any government doing this. It’s the premise of this blog that IRD and its huge powers, is where the rubber meets the road to our total serfdom. All the Left protesting against GCSB, NSA and PRISM, what’s the difference, again, please?

Update 1:

The Canadian Isaac Brock Society is a site set up to provide information on FATCA, and a focus point for whatever forlorn activism is available against it. That site has featured this post, and it's worthwhile taking a look at the growing discussion thread for more information.


Update 2:

New Zealand Left Libertarian Carrie Stoddart-Smith on her interesting blog, Ellipsister, has met my challenge to the Left and overall agrees with this post that FATCA is an appalling privacy invasion and is thus unequivocal in her opposition to it. I suspect it is the Libertarian in Carrie, rather than the Lefty - which I don't see how to reconcile :) - that sums up FATCA as follows:

For all the reasons above, I oppose FATCA and I encourage those who oppose the GCSB legislation to consider the implications of global information sharing based on an individuals citizenship and access to their financial accounts. You may buy into the ‘it targets the 1% who cares’ narrative, but FATCA is not about class. It is about privacy. It signifies the unacceptable encroachment of the State into the lives of every citizen. That is the dystopia we are heading for with FATCA.

Carrie also makes some interesting earlier comments, not covered in my post, at how FATCA stands as a worrisome precedent in international law. Please have a read of her piece.

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