I received this question from reader M:
I hate to ask a stupid question but IRS Notice 2009-85 gave me brain freeze. If your assets consist of property in the US and you sell all the property and pay the proper tax to the IRS before leaving the US, is there another tax or “exit fee” on the net amount received for the property on top of this or on any money removed from US banks upon leaving the US? Thanks.
We are in the land of Section 877A — the law that applies to U.S. citizens and green card holders who give up their citizenship or permanent residence visas.
Let’s assume M is in the unfortunate position where she must do the paperwork and she will have to pay a tax when she gives up her citizenship or green card.
The phrase “exit tax” is sloppy, informal tax lawyer slang. So it is easy to get confused if you don’t know what those teenage delinquents — that would include me, international tax lawyer extraordinaire 🙂 — are talking about.
The “exit tax” is the regular income tax applied to special people, but at an earlier date than would otherwise be the case. The special people are those who give up their U.S. citizenship or green cards.
Example
You bought Google stock for $300/share and now it is worth $400/share. If you remained a U.S. citizen or green card holder, you would only have to pay tax when you actually sold the stock.
On the other hand, if you give up your U.S. citizenship or green card, you have to pay tax on your $100 profit as if you sold your stock the day before your “expatriation date.” (“Expatriation date” means the the day on which you gave up your citizenship or green card. Another piece of jargon!)
It is the same tax amount that you would pay if you had chosen to sell the stock voluntarily. It is just a question of timing and the event that triggered the tax.
Paying the tax on your Google stock because you gave up citizenship or green card status — this is part of what we refer to as the “exit tax.”
Once you have paid the “exit tax” (either in a giant lump sum up front, or because of the 30% withholding made on payments as you receive them) you have cash in your pocket. The IRS will not tax you a second time. You are free to move about the planet.
The phrase “exit tax” that we use consists of four different ways in which you pay tax when you give up U.S. citizenship or green card status:
Four very different items, with different tax rules for each. The teenage delinquents international tax practitioners refer to all four collectively as “exit tax.” That’s confusing.
The general idea is that the IRS wants to tax you as you are leaving. The reason they want to do this is because they are afraid that once you are gone you won’t every come back and voluntarily pay tax to the United States government if they can’t force you to do it. That’s why all of your tax is due immediately. The only exceptions are for things like pensions, where there is a pension plan in the United States who can be forced to do tax withholding for the IRS.
In direct answer to M’s question — you will pay tax once and once only when you exit the United States. In most cases it will be in one giant lump in the year that you give up your U.S. citizenship or green card. In a few cases the tax will be imposed by 30% withholdings on payments to you, forever and ever into the future until you don’t receive any more payments (this is for things like pension payments).
And when you have paid that exit tax, there is no further tax imposed when you want to move your cash out of the United States.
This area is fiendishly complex, not because it needs to be, but because of the peculiar way in which Congress conceived (in the “let’s be fruitful and multiply” sense of the word) this law.
Congress wrote a skanky piece of legislation — stupidly conceived (in the thinking sense, not the “let’s make a baby” sense), poorly written, and full of entirely predictable consequences that are damaging economically and diplomatically to the United States. (Can you guess that I have an opinion about this?)
Congress left next to no legislative history. (Legislative history is the stuff that Congress says so you can figure out what their intentions were, so if you find an ambiguity in the law they wrote you can try to reverse engineer the law to achieve the intent of Congress). You can’t look there for help if you’re puzzled.
Notice 2009-85 is, in my estimation, all you’re going to get in this area of tax law in terms of guidance. There may be a few odds and ends of Notices and Announcements from the Service in the future. But not much.
I don’t think you will get Treasury Regulations issued during our lifetimes. The law is messy (so it is a hard job) and the number of taxpayers to whom it will apply is small (relative to the total population of taxpayers). I don’t think the Commissioner will carve off a bunch of brainpower to throw at this problem.
How will you know what the rules are? You won’t.