What would Meghan Markle’s “expat hell” letter from the IRS look like?

Dear Duchess of Sussex,

On behalf of the US Treasury and Congress, the IRS would like to congratulate you and Harry on your marriage. Your marriage causes us to reflect on how King George’s overreach and tyranny with the Colonies triggered the birth of our great Nation. In that spirit, and now that your wedding is over, we would like to inform you of the following:

You are required to fill out Form 8938 identifying all of your “foreign to us” bank accounts of any type, all identifying data, the highest balances, and send them to the us. This would include any checking or joint bank account you have with your husband, the Prince, as well as any bank account where you would have a beneficial or non-beneficial interest. Please include any volunteer organization, non-profit trust fund, right down to any money that you might have on your “foreign” debit card. Please also monitor our website at all times, because we may, for whatever reason, change the due dates for these forms. Sorry, if that makes it more tricky and can cause exposure to our penalties. Oh yes, the penalties:

• Please note that failure to timely and accurately comply will result in $10K penalty for each violation, that is if we are nice any think that the violation is non-willful. However, we think that it is a willful violation, the penalty will be $100K per violation or 50% of your assets, whatever is higher. We get to chose. And “per violation” means per year, it can mean per account, or per mistake, whatever. Yes, you are right, the penalties can greatly exceed whatever is in your bank account.

• Please note that we will levy these penalties whether or not you owe taxes. The reason why we need to collect this data is that we believe that anyone overseas with a bank account is a terrorist, money launderer, etc. Anyone else that would live overseas must have done so to avoid paying taxes. Why else would you run off and marry a Prince in a foreign country? Yes, we understand that your taxes are higher in the UK, but their taxes are not real taxes. Ours are – and you are avoiding ours, which you are never allowed to do.

• We do not tax you based on your “domicile”, as states do, we tax you based on who you are. Besides, this is not about taxes; this is about penalties.

Please also fill out the Financial Crimes Network Form 114 (also known as the FBAR). Yes, this has the same information as the Form 8938, but because it gives us an excuse to double the penalties mentioned above, we need that too.

We also need to inform you that if the Prince and yourself happen to have children, which we hope that you do, we pass this obligation to them automatically. We know that they will have British citizenship, but for tax purposes, they are as American as apple pie. You may have some trouble declaring them as US citizens, but for tax purposes, no problem. And if you even think about touching Harry’s bank accounts, he belongs to us too!

Please also note, that your bank is also supplying us with this data, and if they don’t, just because you are special in the expat world, we will confiscate 30% of any US asset that bank has. We are sorry if that causes your bank to not to want you as a customer or eliminates your ability even to have signatory rights on any small business or philanthropic organization that you want to start in the UK. And yes, this is a little bit of a gotchya; being that you are already reporting this stuff twice. We understand that reporting bank account balances have nothing to do with taxes. But we feel like we need to create something to make you, your husband’s, and your future kids’ lives miserable. Since many Americans think that everything “abroad” is evil, we know that we can get away with it. And one other thing, we understand that you have a lot of resources to somehow wiggle out of this. That’s ok. We like the compliance people that you will need to hire. They make a fortune out of this stuff. Kind of like paying a tax accountant for multinational corporations to do your personal income tax. It is a great racket. Besides, we have a lot of lower and middle-class people that cannot afford those resources. That keeps us pretty busy.

Please note that if we even kind of think that you can have $50K or more in tax debt to us, we will instruct the State Dept. to cancel your passport. No worries, we will send you a letter with really slow snail mail letting you know. But since you never know about that international mail, it could come after your passport is already canceled. Unfortunately, we do not have the time or resources to allow you any due process with that. So be careful if you are traveling, you may just get stuck somewhere. Too bad that you do not have a British passport yet.

Speaking of which, don’t forget your taxes. We have dozens of special forms for you. We are anxiously waiting to see if your income is earned or is passive. You ask what the difference is? Well, passive income is not subject to those pesky “foreign” tax credits, which means that we can ignore the UK taxes that you pay! That means that we can double tax you even if you are paying UK taxes! Remember, our taxes are the only REAL taxes, their taxes are fake. And as far as privacy, the Europeans are really anal about it. But that’s no problem, we have negotiated a treaty with the UK that allows us to override any privacy law that could block us from us doing our thing to you. Just call it American exceptionalism.

You should be proud of this. The US is the only country in the world that does this stuff. Oops, sorry that is incorrect. The sh*thole country of Eritrea does it too. But they suck at it and do not have near the bullying power that we do to get it done. Some people call Eritrea “human-rights abusers” because of it. Not us! What country would have the guts to even think about calling us human rights abusers? One other thing, because we were afraid that a bunch of you scummy expats might try to escape this, we have raised the bar nearly 500% on the basic cost of renunciation while adding on some exit taxes that can break you and your family. Well, maybe you can afford it, but most scummy expats can’t. Just call it hard love.

See, we are so much better at this stuff than King George ever was.
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact us. Please note that your wait to talk to us may take several hours, and do not expect much when you get us on the phone. But you can give us a ring anyway. Even though you are now far away, we are very happy that our relationship will be much tighter!

Congratulations again on your wedding. Hugs to Harry.
The IRS