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Comment by hectormalot | Hacker News Reader

The main reasons are probably regulation and effort/difficulty to serve.

Assuming you are a US citizen, I highly invite you to come over to Switzerland and try and open a (savings) account if you wish to experience it in person. I'm currently living here, and talking to my US colleagues, I've found that it is near impossible for them to open an account, even though they would bring money to the banks here.

Reasoning? Issues of the US with the Swiss banking system has made these customers more of a pain than a benefit. I'm sure a similar argument can be made for people who (perhaps accidentally) have a bad credit score

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This is not a Swiss specific thing. The US is one of the few countries that taxes citizens (and permanent residents) while the they don't live in the US. Consequently citizens have to self report their foreign income and foreign taxes. There are various tax treaties, but the US person will essentially have to pay the difference between the foreign taxes and the US taxes on that money (that at no point went anywhere near the US, nor any services it provides).

But of course that wasn't enough. The FATCA law requires foreign institutions to also report back to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...

> The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is a United States federal law requiring United States persons (including those living outside the U.S.) to have yearly reported themselves and their non-U.S.financial accounts to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), and requires all non-US (Foreign) Financial Institutions (FFI's) to search their records for suspected US persons for reporting their assets and identities to the US Treasury.

Note the last part. The burden imposed by FATCA on those institutions is so high, that they are refusing to have any US related people as customers. Heck the FATCA law is so wide reaching and onerous that a friend in Sri Lanka was bitching about having to implement it at their company, even though they don't employ a single US related person.

The net result is US citizens living abroad are giving up citizenship rather than deal with all this crap. It is noticeable how under represented Americans expats are, and there will be increasingly fewer. (As a counter-example, you will find Brits everywhere.) This will harm the country and its integration into the rest of the world (economically, politically etc).

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24135021

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/06/fatca-hurts...

http://fatca.hsbc.com/

To make the situation even weirder, "giving up citizenship" to avoid these complications is difficult and expensive for US expats.

Renunciation of US citizenship was free until July 2010, the same year that FACTA went into effect. At that time US embassies started charging a $450 fee to renounce citizenship. In September 2014, this fee was raised to $2,350.

So an American family of four, living abroad, who wants to renounce their US citizenship needs to come up with $9400 to do so.

Not to mention potentially MUCH higher fees to the IRS for becoming an expat:

https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expa...

I have seen other countries do that -- force citizens to pay a hefty fee to renounce their citizenship. It is like they see this as a last chance to extract any money from them, so they make it their worth.

You know, people in US laugh at opressive regimes who they don't allow people to leave the country to travel. Yet US is doing the same in a way with respect to citizenship.

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