Larry's 2011 Tax Guide for U.S. Expats & Green Card Holders....in User-Friendly English!. Laurence E. 'Larry'
Larry's 2011 Tax Guide for U.S. Expats & Green Card Holders....in User-Friendly English!
by
Laurence E. 'Larry' Lipsher
Copyright 2011 prctaxman.corp,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0098-3
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 5 February 2011. Yet it is 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
Also written by Larry Lipsher: ‘The Tax Analects of Li Fei Lao’
First there was Li Fei Lao……Who is Li Fei Lao?
Li Fei Lao, the cartoon avatar of tax columnist Laurence E. 'Larry' Lipsher, was first introduced to the world in February, 2009, in that critically acclaimed but horribly selling gem of a book, '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 are 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 of which tax filers must be aware, Li and Xiao will pop up, every now and then, in Lipsher’s Powerpoint presentations and the will come back to future books, as ‘accountant Lipsher’ becomes more adept at the artistry necessary to write a manga tax novel!!!
Li Fei Lao, a very mediocre Tang Dynasty poet and horrid jazz harmonica player, became master of the subprime rice futures distribution market, which developed into an obscenely profitable agricultural hedge fund specialty that has withstood the current economic dung heap in which the world seems to be, at present.
Obviously, fiction and reality run their separate paths here, because if Larry Lipsher had become proverbial 'King of the World' in some agricultural hedge fund specialty, 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 with an ever more 'inquisitive' Internal Revenue Service asking for more and more from you, the expat.
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! Yet it is an overview you are legally responsible to understand, if for no reason other than risking some rather costly penalties.
Yet we ask you to do something different, something you have probably never done before with matters of tax: read this as a fun piece to read - yes, try reading about tax for the fun of it!
I've tried to write for the fun of it! It's cynical and skeptical and opinionated. Look at the sections you want - you don't have to read the whole thing....but these sections (or the entire book - it is not too long!!!) are written with you in mind!!!
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 44 years. He proudly states that after over four decades of this job, he has yet to develop serious brain damage. Lipsher has worked in Asia for 24 years, living for twenty of them, since 1990, in China.
Lipsher, a past president of the American Chamber of Commerce of South China, has, for the past eight years, been writing the biweekly Asia Tax Review for Tax Analysts of Washington, DC. He has been featured on CCTV's World Wide Watch evening news, CNN and CNBC. He specializes in tax issues involving nine jurisdictions of Asia and the United States. Lipsher has lived in the Pearl River Delta city of Guangzhou, PRC, 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 also writes for TaxIndiaInternational.com
A dedication and a warning……..
I dedicate this book to three ‘heavyweights’ in the area if tax preparation – two attorneys and one CPA who regularly work with expat Americans as tax clients. These three individuals, for various and sundry reasons, are precluded by business affiliation from getting the credit they justly deserve for reading and correcting the humungous amount of technical errors I made. Since I cannot publicly thank them, I dedicate this book to them!!!
I absolutely hate the paragraph that follows but the attorneys, once again, insist that I include it:
IRS CIRCULAR 230 DISCLAIMER: Pursuant to regulations governing the practice of attorneys, certified public accountants, enrolled agents, enrolled actuaries and appraisers before the Internal Revenue Service, unless otherwise expressly stated, any U.S. federal or state tax advice in this book is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, by a taxpayer for the purpose of (i) avoiding penalties that may be imposed under federal or state law or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or tax-related matter(s) addressed herein.
Let the buyer beware: If you have a tax problem, you’d better discuss that problem with someone who can help you resolve that problem – True, the cost you pay for this book is worthwhile, assuming you read the book – and it will help you narrow down some of your options when you have to make a tax decision. But by no means should you think of this book as your sole means of ‘authority’ when you are making a tax decision. Besides, if you want to sue me, you’d have to come to China!
The introduction
a delightful way to ease on into what your tax system is like, including a description of who does not have to file a tax return (and by definition, if you are not eligible for this classification - like most of us - then you do have to file a tax return!). This section also serves to introduce the brand new Form 8938!
Here's a question for you: What do Albert Einstein and Douglas Shulman, the current the Commissioner of the IRS have in common? The answer is something they have in common with most people: they each had to/have to pay someone to prepare their U.S. tax returns for them.
If you do not think that there is something wrong with this, then perhaps you should think about it in more detail - In my opinion, it is very, very wrong! It is wrong to have a system so complex that the head of the IRS can't even prepare his own return. Heck, preparing one's own return should be a mandatory requirement for any Commissioner - it just might be a humbling experience, a wake up call, if you will, that the system stinks!
Yet whether our tax system stinks or not is not why you are reading this. You are reading this because the law is the law is the law and you do not want to break it. I am going to be critical, at times, during this book but please do not misinterpret anything I might say - I don't like the new tax laws; I feel that they stink! I think they put the U.S. into the same category of invasiveness as, say, Libya or North Korea. I value my privacy and do not enjoy it being trampled upon in any way, shape or form. I will exercise my right of free speech and criticize because criticism is due but while I mumble away at times, I will still file and reveal things that I personally believe the IRS has no business knowing about because I am not going to put myself in violation of the law. And while the choice of what you tell your tax preparer is solely yours and while it is not legally the responsibility of that tax preparer to ask you any more than you provide, if you are omitting relevant data, your tax preparer will most assuredly know and ask you about it.
Bear in mind one other thing: The IRS code, regulations, procedures, etc are, cumulatively, 10,000 percent larger