Larry's 2012 Tax Guide For U.S. Expats & Green Card Holders - In User-Friendly English!. Laurence E. 'Larry'
LARRY’S 2012 TAX GUIDE FOR THE
U.S. EXPAT AND GREEN CARD HOLDER
– IN USER-FRIENDLY ENGLISH!
By
Asian Tax Review’s
Laurence E. ‘Larry’ Lipsher
Copyright 2012 by prctaxman.corp, # 7-F, The Garley Building, 53 Graham Street, Central, Hong Kong
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0697-8
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Please note: This book was completed on 14 January 2012. It is, though, an ongoing ‘work in process’ as laws and regulations are continually changing. You just might find out some of those up-to-date changes by looking at our website: www.lifeilao.com. We openly admit that we don’t update the site as often as we wish we could but our intentions are good and we do make changes, at least, on a monthly basis – including our blog!
Also written by Larry Lipsher: ‘The Tax Analects of Li Fei Lao’ (2009) – it’s still a great book! & ‘Larry’s 2011 Tax Guide for the U.S. Expat and Green Card Holder – In User-Friendly English!’
Li Fei Lao comes first…..now who is he?
Li Fei Lao – Fat Old Li, is the cartoon avatar of tax columnist Laurence E. ‘Larry’ Lipsher. Li was first introduced to the world at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong during Larry’s second annual stand-up comic tax routine at the FCC. These luncheons fill up the house, proving that there is much annual concern by US expats about what they believe their government is doing to them. Larry’s 2012 performance at the FCC will be the fifth year in a row that Li Fei Lao will adorn the Power Point presentation that Larry makes throughout Asia’s major cities because, frankly, while it might be a funny book that you are now starting to read, it does require patience, guts, stamina and determination to read a book about taxes, no matter how funny it is. It is far, far easier to be ‘spoon fed’ in a stand up comedic/entertaining session!
Li, venerable sage or lecherous lout – that’s for you, the reader to decide, made his literary debut in that critically acclaimed and still very much up-to-date 2009 printing of ‘The Tax Analects of Li Fei Lao’. While Li and his venerable sidekick, Xiao Go Pi do not adorn the pages of this book, they will make their appearances again, soon, on the website and, as usual in the Power Point slides so very much essential for 2012 updates regarding U.S. taxes. They are both very much a part of Lipsher’s ‘off the wall’ approach to entertaining exasperated American taxpayers about the ever changing nuances of U.S. tax law that ALL U.S. tax filers must be aware of.
So just who is Li? Li Fei Lao is a very mediocre Tang Dynasty poet and horrid jazz harmonica player who has blown that chromatic harp throughout the world, sometimes making it extremely painful to be within listening range! Li became a master of the universe through specializing in the sub-prime rice futures distribution market, which, after the crash of 2008, developed into an obscenely profitable agricultural hedge fund that, frankly, is thriving in a period of Chinese inflation, while the rest of the world suffers through an economic malaise that would never have made it to a movie screenplay prior to 2008 because it is so very bizarre.
Obviously, fiction and reality run their separate paths here, because if Larry Lipsher had become that proverbial ‘King of the World’ in some agricultural hedge fund – or any hedge fund, for that matter – he would not have bothered to masochistically attempt to write a user-friendly overview of what the U.S. expat and green card holder has to be aware of for the coming year, a year guaranteed to be even more onerous based on actions of the IRS towards those obligated to file who happen to reside outside of the United States. Alas, dear readers, the IRS wants more and more and more from you.
To the fullest extent possible, this book is written to provide you with what we believe is all you really need to know as an overview of how you must interface, on an annual basis, with the U.S. government. Hey, it is far from being the whole enchilada (and much, much more than adding chili relano to the plate!). Yet this is an overview you are legally responsible to understand, if for no other reason than saving yourself from ‘willful neglect’ and the penalties – costly, of course – that the IRS will assess for willful neglect.
We ask you to do something different, something you have likely never done before when matters of tax are concerned: read this book for fun! No, I am not out of my mind – I have tried to be as funny and cynical as I can possibly be – ONLY because I want you to have fun reading this!
Don’t read the whole book if you are not interested – simply read the sections that you feel are applicable to your situation. If you want to read the whole thing, from start to finish – hey, it’s not really that long and you might actually enjoy it!
AND…….I dare you to access the forms included at the end off of the IRS website – there’s so much on the IRS site that it is either too intimidating or too impossible to navigate – so look at the forms and instructions included – these might be very, very helpful for you!
Now, who the hell is Larry Lipsher?
Laurence E. ‘Larry’ Lipsher is an American CPA who has been doing U.S. tax returns for the past 45 years. While he proudly states that over the past four decades on the job, he has yet to develop serious brain damage from a life of tax work, those around him seriously wonder. Lipsher has worked in Asia for a quarter of a century, living for 21+ of those years, since 1990, in China.
Lipsher, a past president of the American Chamber of Commerce of South China, has, for the past none years been writing the bi-weekly Asian Tax Review for World Wide Tax Daily of Tax Analysts, Washington, DC. He has been featured on CCTV (China Central Television) World Wide Watch, the most widely viewed evening television news program in the world. He has also appeared on both CNN and CNBC. Lipsher specializes in tax issues involving nine tax jurisdictions within Asia as well as U.S. tax matters – particularly as they apply to U.S. tax filers living and working outside of the United States.
Lipsher has lived in the Pearl River Delta capital city of Guangzhou since 1994. He is one of only a very few foreigners ever to have been given a business license to practice as a certified public accountant in the People’s Republic of China. He is the only non-Chinese writer ever to have articles (two of them) translated and published in the China Accountant, the official monthly publication of the Chinese Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Lipsher has also been writing monthly articles about international tax matters for TaxIndiaInternational.com
A dedication and a warning………
As always, I dedicate this to the ‘heavyweights’ of taxation who have reviewed this to see that I have not strayed too far from what is essentially an ever more invasive series of laws, rulings and regulations that defy rational intelligence. These persons of valor have chosen anonymity, some precluded by their business affiliation from getting the credit they so justly deserve because I make errors – lots of them – and these guys have been there to save my rear-end! Obviously, for that, if nothing else, I am forever thankful!!!!!
Secondly, I dedicate this to American Citizens Abroad, the only organization who has been vocal in its fight against FATCA from the very beginning.
And of course I dedicate this to my wife and daughter because of having to put up with me while I wrote this.
And now, the next line and the