Just one example: Foreign banks must report all financial activities of Americans to the US. An American official wad asked in an interview if the US would then report financial activities of non-Americans to their home tax authorities. The answer was "lol, no, that would be too much effort".
I am having a moment of Schadenfreude...
I know for a fact that the US reports financial information about non-US residents to their home countries.
People get into trouble with Indian tax authorities all the time because they neglected reporting their US income and/or holdings.
The U.S. predominantly compels banks through FATCA. If a bank wants to do business in America, it has to follow FATCA for Americans abroad. There is, of course, some regulatory co-operation. But to my knowledge, most countries don't directly transmit these data to the U.S.–the banks have to report it instead.
The correct analogy would be a foreign country requiring U.S. banks to send them data on their own citizens abroad. Which, I think, e.g. India could probably do.
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.
"Forced"?
You're _way_ everestimating US influence.
Most countries not just "collect citizenship data", they require you to have a valid non-expired ID, valid non-expired residential registration, a fresh digital photo, verified phone number and a valid tax number. All of that without any US interference.
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.
Well I can't see this ending well. It's either more invasive KYC or it's a push towards debanking people out of favor with the government again.
I think there is an opportunity here for an elegant solution.
Banks, by definition, know quite a bit about you and aspects of your identity and this is not necessarily problematic nor dangerous.
Further, banks enjoy exorbitant privileges above all other business firms and organizations - privileges that the public rarely receives any upside in exchange.
For these reasons, I think we should consider concentrating KYC responsibilities with the banks such that they do the heavy lifting and the rest of the economy reaps the benefits.
Here is one small example:
A credit or debit card which, by virtue of the card number itself, identifies the user as being over 18 years of age. The bank already knows this information with very high confidence and now smaller, less resourced firms could make use of this to effectively age-gate with almost no investment and no fragmented intrusion into the private lives of their customers.
I don't see any world in which the banks don't have all of this information anyway - why not get some value out of it ?
It’s probably both of what you’re worried about.
Notably, it’s likely a reaction to the original ‘no gun stores, no porn, etc’ rules which banks have defacto had for awhile.
Endless waste of time, red tape, administratrivia...
All for exactly nothing.
In general, the people against these kinds of things aren't against the simple extra check of something that's theoretically already true (registered to vote / ID at voting place, citizenship at banks, etc). They're against forcing people to provide arcane, asterisk-ridden (including married women! a large demographic!) documents.
If we just had a normal federal ID system like a normal country, where you just got one mailed to you when your kid was born just like their social security card manages to do, then this would all be much more fine. But noooo god forbid we be normal for once. Much better to keep using random bullshit in place of a national ID.
(Non-US people note that this is likely a major difference between the US and your country. The US does not compulsorily provide proof of citizenship to its citizens that can be used at places where one is typically asked to prove one's citizenship.)
Bessent notes here that Real ID would not be considered valid ID for this purpose, which sounds like it will have the same problems as the SAVE act. This could mean debanking anyone who has changed their name and does not have a notarized copy of the name change certificate, and most people who do not drive.
(I am not sure how it would handle minors, who generally do not have any photo ID. Would they have to come in to provide ID when they turn 18?)
The underlying idea is fine, but it creates problems when combined with the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID.
The NYS DMV website shows a birth certificate is required (or passport) for a RealID as proof of birth date.
Is it not valid for proof of citizenship because the dmv doesn’t look at the birth certificate expressly for citizenship? A missing checkbox, then?
Yes, that is obviously the intention of this system.
I'm genuinely unsure which way the partisan tilt would lean on American citizens who get unbanked.
Obviously the court of Fox public opinion would examine their social media to determine if they're woke or Hispanic before deciding this.
It's very dark. I tend to be libertarian about these things and feel like it's none of the government's business. Get a warrant and do your investigations if you want to prove someone is a foreigner up to no good. There is no real problem unless you're xenophobic or racist.
So I don't agree the "underlying idea is fine" at all. This is a step further though, by putting an administrative and financial burden on people to have a bank account.
The fact this is normal in other places in the world doesn't make it ok to me either — two wrongs don't make a right. And in any event many other places are more socialized than the US, so there isn't the same kind of burden on many places as there would be in the US. It would be one thing if the administration were bending over backwards to provide public healthcare, expand education and public research, but they're doing the opposite.
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.
You are required to prove your citizenship to the government (by proxy of your bank or otherwise). The government lacks a unified document of identity which would by law act as a proof of citizenship, and reserves its right to call any other document it is issuing to be “insufficient”.
> any number of citizens do not have ready access to any document proving citizenship.
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.
I didnt have all the documents available for my Real ID which has quite the requirements. In the limit, at least as many as any other citizenship proofing task. We can assume the greatest difficulty would be for the homeless.
It took me ~15 minutes on the social security admin website to get a card ordered to me because mine is lost somewhere in a safe. I had it sent to my house, a PO box, homeless shelter, or any other location would work too. Can be done via a library if you're homeless. Zero excuse.
It took me ~20 minutes to figure out which hospital I was born at and get a copy of my birth certificate shipped to me. See above. Likely marginally more difficult for a homeless person. Not terrible difficult though if you're not so cracked out you don't remember even the state in which you were born. Again, zero excuse.
It took me ~30 seconds to find a document to prove my current residency. Trivial for a homeless person as well. Zero excuse.
Again, in the limit, the government should provide an easier way to do this. But the pearl clutching over the difficulty is to vastly overstated.
This is simply a fantastic excuse to not require citizenship for yet another thing. Something absolutely unheard of in other western countries. I'm beginning to think all of this avoiding proof of citizenship has an ulterior motive.
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?
- can't get a job without a local bank account
- can't get a bank account without a residential address
- can't get a (rented) residential address without proof of employment
- getting a local phone number may also depend on / be required for any of these steps
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
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...
Any policy that suddenly pulls the rug on them is notable precisely because we created the problem (or not-a-problem, depending on your leanings) in the first place.
Are you saying that it is wrong to ever solve a problem quickly, if you are the one who created it?
Also, this will negatively affect a TON of citizens, which always sucks ass even if you think immigration is evil.
I spent most of my time in Texas using either my passport or my old forms of ID because my schedule never aligned with the DMV and I didn't have a driver's license to surrender.
There's a large portion of citizens here that would not have valid or current identification in order to open up an account nor the means to immediately obtain it.
It's estimated that between $250 billion and 500 billion is laundered through US banks every year, though some portion of that is via correspondent banking and not just individual account money muleing.
And this just collects that information. It doesn't actually stop people from opening these accounts or shut them down.
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.
And absolutely it happens, particularly with networks of accounts connected to China. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. FinCEN has been publicly chasing this down for years. Although hawala networks are also a big source of that not mainly personal banking.
Also you're missing the forest for the trees here. Money laundering will most often happen through business bank accounts but a large number of business account holders also have personal accounts at the same bank and link them out of convenience.
Personal ID is also required to open a business bank account. This requirement will likely apply to those as well.
> 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.
As a quick example, I know for a fact they accept expired visas as ID proof to open an account.
After Equifax hired a music major for their Chief Security Officer and leaked everyone's information for free, I had someone open a bank account in my name. Luckily I caught it and got it shut down. I was not reimbursed by Equifax for the giant pain in the ass this was.
That's not persuasive. America does a lot of things different from most of the world, and they're not inherently wrong for doing so.
The rest of your comment makes an interesting point, though.
> The planned EO is one more plank in President Donald Trump’s broader effort to tie his immigration policy to collection of information in the United States, including for voting and Census efforts.
As usual for a Republican agenda, it hurts the economy in order to achieve its ideological goals.
> In addition to legal questions, some policy experts and banks have warned about damage to the economy if people are denied access to the banking system and deposit accounts, as well as potentially big increases in administrative costs for banks. [...] Allowing noncitizens, including undocumented immigrants, to legally open bank accounts using documentation, such as an ITIN, means they can pay taxes and avoid being part of the “unbanked” existing in a purely cash economy. Being unbanked is often associated with less ability to move up the social ladder and contribute to economic growth.
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, the entire point of this law is to try to reduce the number of illegal immigrants (11 million is probably an underestimate) physically present in the US by making it harder for them to use banks and by deputizing banks to do some amount of illegal immigration enforcement by way of banking regulations, as we already do for a variety of classes of crime. If they are currently enfranchised at all, it's because they're also voting illegally, and this is a good argument for putting more stringent checks on legal citizenship when people vote.
> 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.
A huge proportion of that 32 million figure is non-Americans; literally foreigners from other countries who entered or remained in the US in violation of US immigration law. Any of those people voting is a huge problem for actual American citizens. It's not necessarily a problem if foreigners use US banks, just as it's not necessarily a problem if I (an American citizen) use a bank in a foreign country; but if someone avoids using a US bank because they are already present in the US illegally this is a perfectly reasonable outcome because what should be happening to them is that they get arrested and deported.
https://www.businessinsider.com/banks-requirement-citizenshi...
An interesting quote:
> Dissuading people from banking was "one of the more predictable outcomes," Braunegg said, adding that could include people ... and dual citizens who are "wary of cross-border reporting."
You could probably look up a name and birth date and establish if a citizen exists with that information, I guess. You could check social security (which I'm not sure definitively indicates status) and see the same for that. But it's a very messy system in general.
My name is actually different in a few government databases - in one I have two middle names, in the other two last names. Just random clerical stuff like that is common.
(yes, checking against name / DOB / ssn always has some inherent messiness to it)
But there are reasons for people to oppose it on both sides of the aisle (states rights, immigration views, anti federalism, libertarians) so it's a pretty hard task. Maybe this admin could try it as an immigration security measure and get some support that way but I have my doubts.
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.
I naturalized over a decade ago and just realised this is still on my social-security card.
Do I actually have to do anything about it before I go to claim benefits?
Isn't a passport a unified government ID?
Countries with national IDs charge you to replace one if it gets lost, and it usually costs less than 10 USD.
The live update would add an extra element of terror to the system, of course.
Edit: actually the UK system is pretty much this, except it's a token rather than an API, presumably to prevent you looking up random people without their consent: https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
Note that is for right to work, not right to reside, neither of which is the same thing as eligible for a bank account.
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.
That stuff most certainly exists. It's just not for cog #897345673847456 to use in an above the table on the record capacity as part of their run of the mill daily job duties.
Having a social security or other tax-related ID has sufficed for banks so far, which doesn't guarantee the holder is a citizen but does demonstrate enough relevant "status" with the government for banking to probably go smoothly.
Digging ourselves deeper into our already awful decentralized partially-privatized (the CRAs, mostly) identification system by expanding the set of things we have to prove in even more circumstances is not a good thing.
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.
P.O. or private mail box.
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.