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Its Hour Come Round at Last, FATCA Slouches Past Deadline
By Colby Adams and Kira Zalan
printU.S. financial institutions Tuesday began withholding up to 30 percent from payments sent to foreign banks that have not agreed to turn over information on their wealthy American accountholders. The day marked the passage of the first regulatory deadline under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, which requires participating foreign financial institutions to annually report the names, addresses, taxpayer identification numbers and balances of certain American-held accounts exceeding $50,000 in value. A law of no remarkable length, FATCA has nevertheless resulted in hundreds of pages of Byzantine rules that have "sucked all the air out of the tax...
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