Well, they have no choice but to comply with U.S. IRS demands.
What documentation are they asking for? W-9? Passport. Other forms?
My Taiwan bank asked for W-9. I was told this was request from IRS to confirm my identity for data my bank was providing to IRS.
Great, more chances for identity theft. Thanks Obama.
I’m curious on what happens if the IRS were to ask you to provide bank statements for all your Taiwan banks - do they have the ability to obtain that if you ignore such a request? I would imagine that US banks would ignore such a request from Taiwan.
I know that in some countries there’s bank secrecy laws. Maybe it doesn’t apply to Americans. But what about for US visa holders who hold Taiwan citizenship? There’s no tax treaty so there’s technically no tax collection jurisdiction and the IRS can’t collect from Taiwan bank accounts.
The US can throw their weight around and essentially force all kinds of concession out of that country. They can basically force a country to disclose bank statements even if it was against that country’s laws (like say EU’s GDPR for example). I don’t know if this happens in practice. I imagine the EU is more serious about their privacy laws than the US.
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