Monday, May 21, 2007

Financial Disclosure

Ron Paul's financial disclosure statement. Apart from cash, he mainly owns real estate, gold stocks, and bear funds. A surprising (to me) statistic I saw in the Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal (print version) was that only U.S. 282,000 tax returns reported owning a foreign account. Non-resident taxpayers don't need to report this, but H1-Bs are supposed to file as U.S. residents. Another big group with foreign accounts must be U.S. expatriates who also have to file as U.S. residents, wherever they are in the world. Then there must be plenty of green card holders who retained or opened accounts in their home country. Add to them the U.S. citizens who opened a foreign account but live in the U.S. which this article was discussing and the number would have to be bigger than that? I think someone isn't being honest. I didn't realize I was in such a tiny minority by checking that box.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is surprising. Especially considering the penalties are draconian.

mOOm said...

It's possible that they cut out the expatriates from the number, but without checking with the Immigration Department IRS doesn't know that I'm not a US citizen based on my tax return... maybe other H1-Bs don't retain foreign accounts? Anyway I was curious.