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SilasBarta comments on Optimal Employment - Less Wrong
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Doesn't the US tax income American citizens make abroad? And then financially abuse you if the IRS judges that you gave up your citizenship to lower your taxes?
There used to be a special "expatriation tax" that applied only to taxpayers who renounced their (tax) citizenship for tax avoidance purposes. However, under current law, I believe you are treated the same regardless of your reason for renouncing your (tax) citizenship. Here's an IRS page on the subject:
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97245,00.html
This is not an area of my expertise, though.
Not if you're abroad a whole year and you make under a certain amount... forget the exact figure right now but it's much higher than $39k/yr exempted.
You have to file one extra form with your tax paperwork.
I read much the same thing while researching teaching ESL in South Korea. Quickly googling, the current figure for federal exemption is $70,000 (with another $8,000 for housing costs):
Care to summarize what you learned from your ESL research?
The flip answer is that while South Korea seems like a nice place & country, I learned America has no monopoly on xenophobia and North Korea is an even sadder and more twisted country than I had imagined. Were you thinking about anything in particular?
I have tendinitis and therefore unable to do my preferred work as a computer programmer. Thought I would spend the next few months living in a foreign country doing some form of work that doesn't involve a lot of typing while my tendinitis recovers.
Ah. South Korea probably isn't for you then; just getting the FBI background check will cost you a month or three, and teaching contracts tend to be for the academic year. China might be better from an ESL-teaching perspective (which is what my reading focused on), but things are opaque and rather fast-and-loose there - one of my friends was just kicked out of there a few weeks back after the job started, supposedly because he was using too much profanity.
Not sure I understood that properly, is the $70,000/year, or lifetime?
Per year.
Ah, thanks. :)
Holy crap! You can be prosecuted by a country you no longer belong to because they think you stopped belonging to them to avoid paying them taxes? You stopped having to pay taxes to them when you stopped being an American citizen!
Maybe he's talking about American residents who renounced their citizenship but remained in the country? I have no idea how America can tax non-resident non-citizens without their nation making it more trouble than it's worth.
According to http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/world/americas/17iht-expat.3928621.html one of the penalties, if you are judged to have abandoned your US citizenship for tax reasons or not paid the appropriate taxes, is permanent exile. Which certainly could be implemented by the US with minimal trouble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_exile#U.S._rules mentions something about in-US assets being subject to higher tax rates; I suppose any US assets could also be seized to pay back taxes.