U.S. banks may soon collect citizenship data from customers

India does get information from the US and other countries about Indian residents having accounts (bank, brokerage, etc.) in other countries.

There are agreements across several countries that use CRS (Common Reporting Standard) to report such information to other countries for tax purposes. This is not India or US specific.

Since that time, we have grabbed on tighter and tighter, and are finding that the world is starting to seek out a less politically volatile patron for a financial system.

After I told that bank I'd moved abroad, they required me to fill out paperwork for FATCA and give them my US SSN.

I also have to self-report all foreign accounts and their balances to the IRS. The penalties for not doing so are severe.

I'm genuinely unsure which way the partisan tilt would lean on American citizens who get unbanked.

I gave you a shout out! :-P

> the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID

Americans have tended to resist this kind of surveillance (when done by the government). Honestly, because it's not necessary. It doesn't make sense to tax 350 million people when DOJ usually doesn't even go after the known big fish. Or when companies can openly violate e.g. money transfer laws at vast scale until they get rich enough to get the laws changed in their favor.

This feels like the kind of thing that will blow up if they implement it and then have to be kicked down the road forever, like RealID. Old people know that the initial RealID deadline was before Barack Obama's election.

But immediately one can say that most minors will not have the requisite picture ID because they do not drive and we are not required to carry picture ID (this rollout would be touch more people than the requirement that drivers carry ID). So as of right now, most minors in the US cannot prove citizenship under the criteria Bessent is suggesting (yes, the country should be debating this).

Let's call it all the people under 15 so we don't get the "akshully learner's permit" folks objecting. The US has ~60 million people in the 0-14 age bracket, apply whatever ratio you want to that for citizens/noncitizens and you are still going to end up with a lot, likely millions, of people.

The point is that there are hundreds of millions of consumer bank accounts in the US, and it's not clear that Treasury appreciates the turmoil they are proposing. The country has not had a debate over this, it sounds like it might just drop out of the sky one day and create unnecessary chaos.

We can use the rollout of Real ID itself as a gauge. Executives of both parties, and several Congresses, landed on 20 years as an appropriate rollout time to do so smoothly. And that's basically only needed for air travel, which most Americans do not do in a given year.

It's not crazy to ask that a more disruptive change be subject to more scrutiny and deliberation about its rollout.

In your case, everything was straightforward, you already have a license, and your bank is local so you can walk in and show your ID, awesome for you. But over hundreds of millions of people, every edge case will present. (Is it okay for banks to freeze assets of people in hospitals who are unable to perform the necessary steps and present themselves at a bank? Inmates? How are joint accounts handled? What counts as bank account? What happens to money currently held legally here by foreign nationals?)

The one that might affect the most people here: if you have to show ID, presumably the bank has to be able to authenticate it against your person. Which means an in-person visit. This would be bad if you are one of the tens of millions of Americans whose primary bank does not have any branches in their state of residence. I bank at my alma mater's credit union, even though I have not lived in that state for decades. Would I need to travel there to show my ID or have my account frozen?

Again, a bipartisan set of Congresses and Presidents landed on 20 years to rollout when the only real penalty would be some people would not be able to board a plane when they wanted to, without extra scrutiny.

A botched rollout of this could lead to unpredictable financial calamities as rents and other bills go unpaid, etc.

There is simply not an emergency here, we don't have to upend our financial system pretending there is. The ulterior motive here is to preserve the stability of our financial system while making changes.

Is this satire?

The main reason for demographic decline and low fertility is liberal consumerism. Liberal consumerism is the religion of the developed world, and like all religions, it is a worldview that shapes one's understanding of what life is about. Consumerism's implicit anthropology is hostile to fertility, because fertility is at odds with the consumerist imperative. It also shapes how people view relationships and society. Consumerism is totalizing and produces a culture that smothers everything in the logic of consumerism.

Immigration is just an extractive and parasitic bandage over a gangrenous limb. The solution is to destroy consumerism and replaced with something better and more human. This will happen sooner or later, as consumerist societies will be eradicated through selective pressure (they'll go extinct), but it is better to voluntarily wage a religious, cultural, and political war against consumerism to save these societies.

It is also able to field a navy and armed forces that is independently able to hold off against China. Meanwhile, look at Europe and how it's managed the Ukraine Crisis.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...

Are you saying that it is wrong to ever solve a problem quickly, if you are the one who created it?

The money laundering is not happening through consumer deposit accounts (I've never heard your term money mueling and it's almost definitely not people moving $10,000 at a time if that's what you are suggesting).

It is wanton disingenuity to think that the goal of this rule is prevention of money laundering.

> But that doesn’t satisfy Bessent. “Why can unknown foreign nationals come and open a bank account?”

To do business obviously. Are you seriously telling me the government, armed with Palantir, can’t already flag money laundering? Why is an “unknown” in the country in the first place given this admin’s extremely hostile view towards immigrants?

Or an easy out group like the Freedom Convoy protest truckers.

The groundwork for this crap was laid in the 1870s when they were going after the klan, the 1920s bootleggers, then the 1940s-50s mobsters, 1980s drug traffickers, 2000s terrorists, etc, etc. Every step of the way people cheered.

Of course some people looked at the "hurricane cone" of public policy at the time and said that we were not on a good path. Of course they were ignored.

We don't have a national ID system, and we have millions of undocumented immigrants, as well as millions of African Americans who have been systematically oppressed in order to elevate the interests of a white majority. (that's not an opinion, it's a fact; our Supreme Court literally wouldn't let southern states change election laws without checking with them, because southern states wanted to eliminate most black people from voter roles)

21 million adults in this country lack a driver's license. Of those the largest groups are Black and Hispanic populations. 11 million more without IDs are undocumented immigrants. That's 32 million people disenfranchised and unbanked. A larger population than most EU countries, without a vote or a bank account.

IF you introduced a national ID system, and got every single American on it, then this wouldn't be an issue, because everyone could still vote and bank. But that's not what they want. They want 32 million people to suffer. That's why this is wrong, regardless of what's common in Europe.

(yes, checking against name / DOB / ssn always has some inherent messiness to it)

It doesn't. When I naturalized, I had to schedule an in person appointment at the Social Security offices to change my status in their systems. There was a time gap between me being American, me having a passport, me being recorded as American as far as SS was concerned and me having a SS card that didn't have caveats written across it.

Isn't a passport a unified government ID?

Yes, I think I didn't do a good job of placing the question as from the perspective of someone who is not aware of the silos and firewalls within what might otherwise appear to be a monolithic government.

The terror to the system is from the perspective of having lived within the system and not understanding how to operate in the world outside of it. It is a classic sci-fi trope; Brazil and The Minority Report come to mind. It is also a feature of classical Athens where ostracism was a particularly severe punishment.

In most countries of the world, the best way to prove your citizenship is to apply for a visa. That is you world apply for a US visa and get an official rejection, because US citizens don't need/cannot get a visa, and the rejection document would be the proof of citizenship.

Or a FS-240, Consular Report of Birth Abroad, from the State Department. I was born on a US military base and although I have a birth certificate, the only think I've ever been able to use it for was my REAL ID. I had to use the FS-240 for my passport, SSN, etc.

Banks are cracking down on PO boxes and CMRAs as the residential address for their clients. It's fine as the mailing address, but people who travel abroad full time may not have a permanent residential address.

Right now, you can choose to use a friend/family address, or you can pay a company to provide a residential address for you.

We should be able to say "I have no permanent residential address since I'm travelling, please send all mail to this CRMA.", but that isn't a supported scenario today.

This all gets complicated for full-time US travellers abroad who may spend all year outside of the country, but they still have to have domicile in some state even when they don't have a permanent address in any state.

I couldn't figure out a way to do it. Even looking at services aimed at people living in RVs didn't seem like it was going to work. For one thing, I couldn't get a PO Box without a home address, LOL.

Banks know which addresses are residential and which ones are commercial. Sometimes you can get away with using a mail forwarding service until you get a KYC review. But if you can't provide a real residential address when that happens you'll run into problems (freezes, account closures). I've had it happen.

Patriot act paranoia.