Netherlands Bank prohibited from discriminating against "US persons"

Here is an interesting development for FATCA: a case in which a small Dutch bank pre-emptively shuttered the accounts of 150 persons in order to avoid having to fulfill US FATCA information sharing requirements. Of course, as we well know, denying accounts to "US persons" does not exempt anyone or any entity from FATCA, but only saves the cost of annual information gathering and reporting. From the story:

BinckBank N.V. (h.o.d.n. Alex), een beleggingsbank, maakt verboden onderscheid op grond van nationaliteit door een man vanwege zijn Amerikaanse nationaliteit uit te sluiten van zijn dienstverlening.

Which very roughly translates to "BinckBank NV (DBA Alex), an investment bank, may not discriminate on grounds of nationality by denying services to a man with American citizenship."

From the case, again, very roughly translated:

A man with Dutch nationality lived most of his life in the Netherlands. He is a U.S. citizen because he was born in America. That makes him liable to tax in America, as a "U.S. person." The man has an investment account with Alex. ... Following an agreement between the Netherlands and the United States to exchange financial data, the Bank terminated the services of the man and all other (150) U.S. persons on 1 December 2013. In the course of 2014, [a law to implement an IGA with the United States was] submitted to parliament. The aim of the law is to ensure that U.S. persons who live outside of America file their tax returns with the IRS. As of July 1, 2014, Dutch financial institutions must provide information on U.S. persons to the IRS. Alex does not want to comply with the obligation to provide all transaction data by U.S. persons, because to do this, the bank must make significant adaptations to its administrative systems. Given its small number of U.S. person clients, this adaptation would impose disproportionate costs, with additional disclosure services producing a loss-making operation. According to the bank, the discrimination is not banned because it is based on a generally binding regulation. The bank also argues that the discrimination be allowed to continue, because the financial consequences are unacceptable. 

Verdict

The Board for the Protection of Human Rights ruled against BinckBank, finding that terminating service to the man constituted unlawful discrimination on grounds of nationality.

Reasoning

The bank states that U.S. persons can no longer hold accounts. The bank therefore denies its services to people with U.S. citizenship. This is direct discrimination on grounds of nationality. Direct discrimination is prohibited, unless the law makes an exception, such as in a generally binding regulation that compels a distinction. The Board considers that the bank does not oblige the agreement and the law envisaged does not allow for exclusion of individuals with U.S. citizenship. The bank has merely chosen for commercial reasons to deny service to Americans. The Board therefore dismisses the bank's statutory exception. The Board also considers that there is no reason to make the ban on the use of direct discrimination on grounds of nationality. This decision was made on the grounds of reasonableness and fairness.

My informal translator had a little trouble with the last paragraph; suggestions welcome.

From this we can see that small institutions are between a rock and a hard place, at least in the Netherlands and likely many other places as well, but only to the extent that foreign governments employ their human rights regimes to step in and protect Americans from the skewed incentives created by American law. I note that the Netherlands, along with most other IGA partner countries (but not Canada) has included an express provision forbidding discrimination, but this applies only to institutions that are not required to register because they are exempt:

Annex II: Non-Reporting Netherlands Financial Institutions And Products
II. Deemed-Compliant Financial Institutions.
A. Deemed-Compliant Financial Institutions
1. Financial Institutions with a Local Client Base
j) The Financial Institution must not have policies or practices that discriminate against opening or maintaining accounts for individuals who are Specified U.S. Persons and who are residents of the Netherlands.

I had assumed this meant that it would be ok for FIs that are required to comply with FATCA to turn away US customers, as appears to be a growing practice. Not so, if foreign governments can be relied upon to force their own institutions to bear the costs of lending assistance to the United States in perfecting its extraterritorial tax claims, under the mantle of protecting US persons' rights against discrimination in these foreign territories. 

I note that in this case the discrimination claim was mounted by the accountholder to preserve his right to banking services. I await the inevitable barrage of cases that surely must arise as individuals assert other discrimination-based claims in connection with the highly problematic U.S. tax regime.

As a not insignificant aside, it is worrying to me that here we have a foreign court explaining that the purpose of FATCA is "to ensure that U.S. persons who live outside of America file their tax returns with the IRS." I have seen absolutely no evidence that this is the case; I have seen absolutely nothing in any iteration of FATCA to suggest that the idea behind this legislation was to perfect US taxation on those living abroad with US status as citizens or otherwise. Rather, the aim of FATCA was to stop Swiss bankers selling tax evasion to Americans living in America. 

This may seem like an insignificant point but I believe it is important because one day we will look back and reflect upon what will surely turn out to have been a spectacular mistake: that FATCA induced governments around the world into a headlong rush into global automatic information exchange on the strength of an unexamined idea about which taxpayers belong to which countries. One day we are going to have that discussion, and it will need to be remembered that when the world jumped on the FATCA bandwagon, no official in any government apparently considered whether it was right, or good, or just, for the US to impose its income taxation on the basis of legal status. I think when that discussion finally takes place, that omission will be seen as fatal.