{"id":6,"date":"2008-06-20T11:11:52","date_gmt":"2008-06-20T09:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/blog\/?p=6"},"modified":"2008-06-20T11:11:52","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T09:11:52","slug":"how-the-us-bureaucracy-breaks-down-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=6","title":{"rendered":"How the U.S. Bureaucracy Breaks Down Abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There’s a lot you don’t think about when you live in America.\u00a0 Taxes are what they are.\u00a0 You can usually even do them yourself.\u00a0 If you want a passport, you go to the post office and apply.\u00a0 If you want to donate to a charity you go to their web page and donate.\u00a0 But if you’re not a U.S. resident, things get a little more tricky.\u00a0 For one thing, that donation you wanted to make has a form that only lists states without an option for countries.\u00a0 This happened to me when Bill Cosby called for everyone to donate $8<\/a> to the U.S. National Slavery Museum<\/a> (although I notice that they’ve now fixed this little problem by moving to PayPal).<\/p>\n

When a child is born normally you don’t need to do anything, except perhaps sign the Social Security application.\u00a0 For us it was another matter.\u00a0 We had to first get an international birth certificate, then get a foreign births registration, and then get a Social Security card and a passport.\u00a0 All of this was necessary<\/a> for our taxes and for Joanna to be able to travel to the United States.\u00a0 As an American she has to enter the U.S. on a U.S. passport.<\/p>\n

And of course anyone who has seen the Borne Identity thinks they know what the U.S. Consulate in Z\u00fcrich looks like.\u00a0 Well surprise!\u00a0 It looks nothing like what you see in the movies.\u00a0 It’s a little hole in the wall with a very SMALL waiting room and no place to change the diaper of a four month old baby, which is how old she was when we did all of this.<\/p>\n

But it got even sillier.\u00a0 We brought the required pictures for her, and the charg\u00e9 d’affairres informed us that we couldn’t use pictures that were printed my handy dandy little Canon.\u00a0 Instead we had to go and get professional photos.\u00a0 And the hits just keep on coming.\u00a0 The picture of a new born child is not all that identifying.<\/p>\n

And of course then there’s me.\u00a0 With the mad rush for passports thanks to inane policies<\/a> of the Bush Administration, if I need to get a new passport, which I will soon, it means I will have to park it in Switzerland for whatever period of time it takes for that passport to make it all the way to the States, sit in some pile, and make it all the way back to Switzerland.\u00a0 Probably some weeks.\u00a0 This doesn’t seem like a lot, for most people, but Switzerland is a small country, and work sometimes requires me to travel.<\/p>\n

You may like to invest your money in mutual funds.\u00a0 Hopefully that’s protected you from some of the downturn that has occurred lately.\u00a0 As expatriates, however, we are generally excluded from buying new mutual funds thanks to a lack of clarity as to how they are regulated outside of a state.<\/p>\n

Want to use Quicken?\u00a0 Forget it.\u00a0 Quicken is not usable for foreign currencies, and so you end up doing kludges like treating foreign bank accounts as mutual funds with each unit priced in dollars.\u00a0 Did I mention that because we have foreign accounts we have to file yet more paperwork?\u00a0 Hopefully gnucash<\/a> will be more usable in the future than it was in the past.<\/p>\n

When we actually do come back to the States, we’ll have to deal with yet more<\/strong> paperwork to bring in our cars (if we can at all) and even some of that California wine we brought across.<\/p>\n

The thing about paperwork is that perhaps in each instance there is a goal that someone could argue is legitimate.\u00a0 For instance, in my daughter’s case, the government is trying to protect against kidnapped children.\u00a0 But a picture really won’t help, and yet it’s required.\u00a0 And if they want one, they should make it easy for citizens to comply.\u00a0 The paperwork for bank accounts is meant to address tax evasion through offshore accounts.\u00a0 In the case where someone lives in the States, that makes sense.\u00a0 But does it really make sense for those of us who live abroad?<\/p>\n

Well, as it turns out, many of us pay taxes to the United States even though we don’t live there.\u00a0 Yes, my daughter will be cursed with this when she is old enough, just because she is American.\u00a0 I don’t mind paying some taxes, actually.\u00a0 America is my home country.\u00a0 But I expect representation in return, and really all I want is civility out of our civil workers and some intelligence about when and how to apply rules that involve paperwork.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a lot you don’t think about when you live in America.\u00a0 Taxes are what they are.\u00a0 You can usually even do them yourself.\u00a0 If you want a passport, you go to the post office and apply.\u00a0 If you want to donate to a charity you go to their web page and donate.\u00a0 But if … Continue reading “How the U.S. Bureaucracy Breaks Down Abroad”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-expat-fun"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}