Ok, that makes sense. I do pay SSI in China, but I'm sure I'll never see anything good from that. Would have been nice to at least get a 401K or something. Retirement funding is also another huge pain in the ass for expats.

> Now, a tax return can cover multiple people and some of the Americans living abroad are children. I'll be generous and say that some one million people aren't following the law, compared to a few hundred people who are doing what the law says in order to avoid the extra hassle.

Everyone who has an accountant doing their taxes is following the law, and that is much of the high end (sans those who are explicitly dodging taxes, of course). I do see my friends who have accountants paying more than me, but I think this is because the accountants are very conservative in how they deal with double taxation.

Most of us are mostly following the law.

> Has that reporting rate gone up or down? How much revenue has the US gotten from its ex-pats because of the heightened reporting requirements?

Many of us are just normal worker bees who already pay enough taxes in the country we are working in. It makes no sense for us to renounce our citizenship to not pay taxes we don't need to pay anyways.

> Before I moved here, I visited often for work. I would rent a business apartment for a month or two. Most work on P.O.s and the giro/SWIFT system, not by credit card or cash. I also had difficulty purchasing some things online because sites wanted a Nordic bank card.

I have the opposite problem: I don't have a US credit card and get lots of pain because of that. The Chinese system is quite limited.

> You could not file your income tax. It seems that over 1 million people don't do so. It would help if you never wanted to return to the US. (A friend of mine lives in Shanghai, and has for almost 10 years. I'm pretty sure she's not paid US taxes during that time.)

She probably doesn't have to pay US taxes if she's paying higher Chinese taxes. Anyways, she should file tax forms just to put $0 on that line.