Sucks! I was really hoping for a bunch of ‘find a new accountant, that’s not right’ replies...
@Sisko Unfortunately if he were to renounce citizenship now it would be impossible to prove he wasn’t doing or for tax Reasons (and we’d still be stuck with this tax bill). While it might save him from future craziness, I am not even sure he would be able to now... They don’t take kindly to people reonouncing when they could tax them in the future.
@Novik there is no way to transfer the company to me, I can’t afford to buy it, and transferring it would surely trigger gift/gains taxes... besides the tax is due based on assets as of November 1, they put it in retroactively so no one had time to move money...
@Goldielocks, not quite, I think this is mainly an unintended consequence of legislation put into place quickly. It’s designed to penalize us residents and corporations who had structured their business and parts of their business abroad to avoid paying the us business rate. There are even incentive deals for bigger corporations to avoid this tax by moving back to the us... I don’t think anyone even realized how this would affect non resident citizens or dual citizens who live, own and operate a business abroad.
Also I am pretty sure the foreign tax credit won’t apply to this as of yet, but it’s definitely something we will bring up with our MP...
We are having a tough time processing a foreign country essentially stealing assets from a Canadian company. This money was destined to be spent and taxed in Canada, and now it’s going to the US government...