GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Eat forms! Stay thin! Whittle down those calories through worry! Americans abroad may have some sage advice for fellow citizens. A survey headline that is being picked up by media because it is catchy and touches a subject near and dear to Americans, food, states that “Americans Find Doing Their Own Taxes Simpler Than Improving Diet and Health”.

US citizens abroad struggle to convince fellow Americans that the tax-filing burden is onerous for those living outside the US, but getting the folks back home to digest that information looks unlikely, if the new survey is right. Taxes aren’t as sweet as food, and sadly, the survey report lacks any meat on tax filing problems to back up the story.

Here’s what it does show, providing food for thought for Americans abroad:

The US-based International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation’s 2012 Food & Health Survey shows that “Six out of 10 Americans have given a lot of thought to the foods and beverages they consume (58 percent) and the amount of physical activity they get (61 percent). Yet, only 20 percent say their diet is very healthful and 23 percent describe their diet as extremely or very unhealthful; less than 20 percent meet the national Physical Activity Guidelines.”

A worrisome detail is that “Fewer than one in 10 Americans correctly estimate the number of calories they need to maintain their weight and only three in 10 believe that all sources of calories play an equal role in weight gain. Calories from sugar, carbohydrates and fats are believed more likely to cause weight gain.”

Marianne Smith Edge, senior vice president for nutrition and food safety at the foundation, says “Clearly, there is a disconnect for many Americans.” The survey shows that “76 percent agree that ever-changing nutritional guidance makes it hard to know what to believe.”

That point eerily echoes one often made by US citizens living overseas, that the ever-changing IRS guidelines and rules make it hard to know how to file.

The tax part of the survey is thin, to say the least. The catchy headline is not backed up in either the press release or the executive summary with even a hint of what questions people were asked about filing taxes. A comparitive survey with Americans abroad could be interesting.

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Compromise is the only way forward, former US President Bill Clinton told business leaders and students in Lausanne Sunday night, in a speech at IMD, and that includes resolving the eurozone crisis. “What works in people’s lives are creative networks of cooperation,” he told the crowd of several hundred. He pointed to areas, including some of the world’s poorest, where progress is being made because of cooperation. “Always, there are creative networks of cooperation committed to sustainable economics, good business practice and vibrant civil society.”

Europe’s crisis today with Greece and sovereign debt needs a strong dose of cooperation, and that involves compromise, Clinton argues. “Those principles have to inform what you ultimately do in trying to reach a compromise growth pact in the short run with appropriate levels of semi-restraint and structural reform in the long run, in Europe. That’s what works. Everywhere. And that’s what gets you moving forward.

“There are no perfect solutions in a murky life. What you want to do is bend the arc so you’re going forward every day so when people get up in the morning they have something to look forward to instead of looking in the mirror and feeling despair.”

Clinton in 2005 founded the William J Clinton Foundation.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – News just in from Utah: the 25,000 security breaches of US social security numbers at the state health department’s Medicaid servers  turns out to be 280,000, reports Computerworld/CNN.

A month ago I wrote the sentence below, then didn’t get around to finishing the story. Now I wish I had.

You don’t have to be conspiracy theorist to be more than a little concerned about stories cropping up that people are asking for information you don’t need to give them, notably social networking log-ins and US social security numbers.

The stories behind this ran in the Vancouver Sun and MSNBC, about  job-seekers being asked to give future employers their Facebook passwords. Bad idea, but it is happening.

Worse are illegitimate requests for American social security numbers because many of the requests are borderline legitimate. Employers need them in the US,  and some government offices need them – the case in Utah, where hackers managed to get in through a back door and steal the numbers.

So, any point in protecting them? If  you believe there is some point in trying to protect your identity, then yes, definitely. If you’re throwing in the towel over privacy protection, read no further and start posting your bank pin codes on lamp posts and the Internet.

For the rest of us: a US social security number doesn’t need to be given out until a contract is signed. Credit companies and insurance companies don’t always need them although some employees are convinced, wrongly, that they do. But the numbers are printed on some health insurance cards, for example, making them less than private. The US Coalition for Sensible Public Records Access, in a 2008 paper on public documents, points out that you can’t have it both ways: data cannot be both public and private. The group has some helpful reflections on the bigger picture and what states in the US, for example, should be doing.

Here’s what the US Social Security Administration says, the official poop on the SS numbers and your rights:

Silent march to honour those who died, Tuesday evening 20 March in Sierre

Police officer whose unit was first on the scene dies of acute leukemia; police in mourning again

Canton Valais police carry the coffins of those who died in the Sierre bus crash 13 March onto a Belgian airplane that would fly the bodies home (photo ©2012 Keystone)

SION, SWITZERLAND – Most of the injured children have gone home to Belgium and the bodies of those killed have returned home following the bus crash one week ago, 13 March, in Sierre. The 250-plus journalists from around the world who abruptly descended on the central Valais region with cameras, radio mikes and TV film crews just as abruptly disappeared over the weekend. They arrived by air, road and train in Sion, the capital and nearby Sierre, where the autoroute tunnel accident occurred, within a few short hours of the news of the crash.

For five days the canton Valais Police did an extraordinary job, and it’s time to give them their due, now that media attention is pointed elsewhere. A contingent is heading today to Belgium, to be with the families of those killed in the crash, to offer their support for the next two days. The funerals take place Thursday.

An additional heartbreak this week

The police are carrying an additional burden this week, with the very sad news Tuesday morning that Jacques-André Barras, a 38-year-old police sergeant, has just died of acute leukemia. Barras was the leader of the unit that responded first to last week’s crash, immediately putting in place an extraordinary rescue and medical operation.

He is survived by his wife and two young daughters.

Barras died proud, I hope, of his colleagues and his own work, for they deserve our recognition for this. The job of the police is to keep order and this they did with truly remarkable organizational skills last week. That alone is noteworthy, but during a week of incredible, non-stop stress for them I also saw compassion, sadness, kindness and helpfulness that went far beyond the call of duty.

Clearly, they were not the only heroes: the medical teams were nothing short of extraordinary. Their fellow disaster workers in the fire department and medical services were remarkable, and all the unsung heroes who came out in the middle of the night to translate or help with other tasks. But the police work, separating those who were helping and those who needed help from the rest of us who were just upset and concerned, was crucial to making the best of a very bad situation.

A surprising patience with the media

I’ve covered bombings, celebrity and royalty visits and a number of other mega-media events and I have never before seen the police make such an effort to help journalists do their job, while ensuring that obnoxious reporters (and there are always some) did not cross the line of what could be allowed under the circumstances.

The police communications team provided good access to medical, hospital and political leaders while doing an excellent  job of protecting the privacy of the families from Belgium and Holland.

They kept the children who were injured safe from public curiosity as well as legitimate public worry, not necessarily easy in small cities when a mass of journalists arrives.

The police officers worked flat out to provide this level of protection just after the horror of the crash itself, where scores of officers were involved.

They saw to it that hospital transfers were done discreetly and smoothly, that the bodies were loaded onto the planes without obtrusive cameras (Keystone for images and RTS for television were the only ones given access, on condition that they provide photos for the rest of the media).

They provided an honour guard. They looked exhausted all week but I never saw a single police officer become impatient with media people and while a heavy sadness cloaked them, I never saw anyone break down or do less than his or her duty.

A very heartfelt thank you to the entire police corps.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I just deleted the Chicago Sun-Times “Zurich update” news feed from my Twitter account after seeing Zurich basketball games that didn’t have much to do with Switzerland. I recently got rid of another news feed about Geneva, Switzerland because too many of their posts were about Wisconsin and Illinois weather and crimes.

Last week I sent a number of nasty notices to someone who was illegally picking up GenevaLunch posts and republishing them on several sites that encourage the visitor to think they are legitimately about and from Switzerland. These are posted from Florida and have nothing to do with Switzerland. At least a real human being replied to my threats about their theft.

All of these are picking up news feeds and just republishing them, what I called stirring the news rather than creating it. And many use multiple feeds that simply look for words like “Zurich” then dump basketball from Illinois with art exhibits in the Swiss town, as if no one will notice the difference.

A plea from this editor: please help us to continue producing real news by scrapping the frauds from your feeds, on the Internet, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. If you are looking for information about Swiss rail passes, train tickets, hotels and chocolate, for example, please be sure the site you are visiting is the real thing and not just a lookalike, so that the information you get is accurate and up to date, and the frauds don’t have your visits to count.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – “Killing the messenger’ is a project carried out annually for the News Safety Institute the the Cardiff, Wales, School of Journalism, toting up the number of journalists who are killed each year while reporting, usually from strife-torn areas. Last year saw 124 reporters killed, with 45 of them, the largest proportion, working for TV news stations.

RIP

Source: News Safety Institute March 2012

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The new Timelines option for Facebook users that has been gradually rolled out for individuals in recent weeks will be available to companies for their brand pages, starting at the end of this month, according to Ad Age. The date of the new feature’s availability has been the subject of much speculation but it now appears likely that the company will provide details and introduce Timeline for pages 29 February at a conference it is holding for marketing people.

Ad Age suggests a number of changes that are expected to be part of the new version, more in line with branding needs of companies which have pages.

Mashable in December made a stab at guessing what the new pages’ Timeline might look like.

Pay her a visit in the name of love: Lady of Galera, in alabaster, Greece

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – It’s St Valentine’s Day, so let’s aim high for marriage and partnerships. I’ve just seen a truly optimistic web site in French that offers suggestions for your “noces d’albâtre” which I had to look up since I didn’t remember that particular anniversary.

The suggestions include admiring alabaster statues by visiting the Rodin Museum in Paris or going to Greece. You can check out, online, what animal passions bond the two of you. You can also find suggestions for the perfect gift, which include, for example, a necklace of precious stones for her and a fine watch for him, to mark those happy years together.

And don’t forget to send a card saying “I love you.” (ok, the French is more romantic sounding, so go for “Je t’aime.”

In English, alabaster is apparently your 37th anniversary, in some countries.

But in French, your noces d’albâtre is your 75th wedding anniversary. So if any of you old folks out there are reading this, online, trying to work out the perfect gift to mark the day I sincerely wish  you the best of luck and another 75 years of shared bliss!

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – This is an appeal to intelligent readers, and I know there are many out there, to at least reflect on the other side of the story if you’ve read the New York Times editorial published Friday 10 February on US pressure on Swiss banks.

It’s a remarkably trite piece of writing, with generalized and inaccurate remarks like “the Swiss banking industry refuses to exit the business of tax evasion” which are an embarrassment to more honest journalists who spend time researching, interviewing and pulling the threads that make for balanced reporting.

Our goal is to inform the public so public opinion can help drive negotiations to be based on understanding and fairness rather than acrimony; the NY Times appears to have another agenda.

For a start, look at the Reuters story today on Swiss banking and business industry suggestions, run by the Chicago Tribune, although I would have liked to see a suggestion that US banks in Florida ask for proof of tax payments from Latin American clients, just to put the comments about proof of payment difficulties in perspective.

The Economist can’t be accused of coming down soft on the Swiss, but its story this week provides better balanced reporting than that from NewYork.

Ironically, one of the people quoted there seems to admire the NY Times editorial but in the way you love a football team whose weaknesses you’re willing to overlook. You just want them to win.

The NY Times editorial has at least six factual errors (I got tired of counting after that), mostly just slight exaggerations, but they undermine any credibility the writer had at the outset. One of the errors is this: “The United States would like details of all secret Swiss bank accounts used by Americans to evade taxes”, as if every American who has a Swiss bank account is hiding money and evading taxes.

No, either the writer should say that within the scope of these negotiations the US is asking for help with data from 11 banks out of the 325 that provide wealth management or he or she should say bluntly that the US is asking for details of all Swiss bank accounts held by all Americans. Both of those statements are accurate. Most of the US accounts are not Jame Bond-style numbered accounts and they are not “secret” in the sense that Americans who live in Switzerland  routinely file reports from their banks when they file Swiss taxes.

Americans at town hall meetings in Switzerland in the past two years, and more recently in Canada, have been objecting to the new Fatca rules because they object to the underlying principle the US follows, the only major country in the world to tax on the basis of citizenship rather than residence. Participants have said it forces them to bear a heavier burden than Americans who live in the US. Others object to the unfair treatment of double taxation, the case for Americans who are retired in another country, for example. And yet others object to the high cost of filing US taxes they don’t owe.

Fatca, the tool for obtaining this information, is part of the current US-Swiss negotiations, for a good reason. It will place a huge financial burden on Swiss banks, as well as banks elsewhere, with its extra-territorial legislation, and the ramifications of this go beyond the current situation where Swiss banks are refusing American clients, to the dismay of Americans who live in Switzerland.

The NY Times would have us believe, taking the American bully approach of bluffing, that it’s just a question of the Swiss government dragging its heels: “There is no need for the United States to accept this sort of arrangement. If Switzerland stonewalls, the Justice Department can indict banks that benefit from tax evasion and seize their assets in the United States, moves that could put them out of business. At some point, the Swiss government will find that result a lot more costly than handing over information on American tax cheats.”

The negotiators for both countries are perhaps wiser, well aware that Swiss banks, and those elsewhere, could also recommend to clients that they pull out of US securities investments, a move that would be dire for the US economy. Switzerland has a far larger chunk of offshore private banking than the US, a business American banks would love to get their hands on, particularly in Florida. And Americans are just a small part of that Swiss wealth management business, so losing that group won’t put Swiss banks out of business.

These distinctions are important for an intelligent debate to take place and for negotiators’ efforts on both sides to be understood at home. The Swiss, contrary to the image US media perpetuate, don’t love crooks. The income tax non-compliance rate in Switzerland, which uses the carrot more than the stick to get its citizens to pay, is estimated to vary from 12 to 35 percent a year. It hit the peak abruptly in 1990 as non-compliance  in the cities of Basel and Geneva soared, then rapidly dropped again by 1995 to 21 percent, according to a study in 2007 by Lars Feld and Bruno Frey.

The IRS said in a 2006 report that non-compliance in the US was “low”, at an estimated 26 percent.

To balance out the debate a bit, here is what the Swiss government says in a report published Friday 10 February, “Report on international financial and tax matters 2012″:

“Switzerland has been holding talks with the United States on unresolved tax issues for more than a year. These talks relate to the US investigations into alleged infringements of US tax legislation by Swiss banks and the potential handover of client data. Under Swiss law, client data may be handed over as part of an administrative assistance
procedure at federal level, but not directly by a bank. The objective of the negotiations with the US authorities is to find a solution that is compatible with Switzerland’s current legal framework.

“The cases of the directly affected banks are to be dealt with through requests for administrative assistance: in the case of tax fraud in accordance with the existing double taxation agreement (DTA) of 1996, and in the case of both tax fraud and tax evasion in accordance with the new – but not yet ratified – DTA of 2009. Under the existing DTA, requests for assistance are possible even without the provision of specific names or personal details, as long as an alternative form of identification is supplied. Applications on the basis of specific patterns of behaviour should also be possible under the new DTA without the provision of specific names or personal details. However a decision has yet to be made by Swiss parliament in this respect.

“At the same time, a global solution is being sought that will apply to the entire Swiss financial centre and thereby put the past to rest. Another development geared to the future is the US “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act” (FATCA), which was passed by Congress in March 2010. This legislation is designed to ensure comprehensive worldwide reporting on US taxpayers who hold bank accounts and assets with financial services providers outside the United States. The US authorities have set out a staggered timeframe for the implementation of this Act (expected to apply from 1 January 2014 onward).

“Given its significant international activity, particularly with the United States, Switzerland will be greatly affected by this legislation. FATCA envisages the imposition of a withholding tax of 30% on all payments of dividends, interest, sales proceeds, etc. from the United States to a foreign financial institution, irrespective of whether the financial institution in question is accepting payment on behalf of a US taxpayer, another client or indeed itself. To avoid payment of this withholding tax, a financial institution must sign an agreement with the US tax authority (the IRS) in which it accepts comprehensive reporting obligations with respect to all clients who are liable to pay US taxes. This will involve a substantial amount of administrative work. After the Federal Council instructed the FDF to initiate discussions, SIF made it clear to the US authorities during a number of different meetings that the implementation of FATCA had to take account of the concerns of the financial institutions that would be affected. Modalities for a simplified implementation of FATCA will be sounded out within the scope of talks on general financial issues.”

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – “Tax haven” must be one of the most over-used and abused and least understood terms that is regularly unleashed by bureaucrats and politicians on unsuspecting voters who are angry about financial and tax inequality. I’m one of those voters, but I cringe when I see the term, especially coming from the US. This morning it was used by CBS News, which lumped together Ireland, Switzerland and the Bahamas as tax havens” in relation to Mitt Romney and his money.

If the name Delaware surfaces, “tax haven” is replaced by something like “no corporate tax” or “corporate friendly” by its fans and if it is Ireland we hear about “low corporate tax” or “tax friendly” from the big accounting firms, although Business Insider and Ireland’s Politico more bluntly call it a tax haven. Google is one of the key examples there.

Politico’s article on where FTSE 100 companies plant their money and which tax havens they use is a helpful contribution to the discussion.

The over-burdened taxpayer in the US or Ireland could be forgiven for saying yes, but these are companies that create jobs, so this kind of tax haven is okay, whereas the ones that cater to rich individuals (and Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Bahamas are likely to come to mind) are wrong because they’re just used by the rich to hide their wealth.

My sin, but your sensible tax policy

This isn’t a plea for higher corporate and wealth taxes or lower ones for those who aren’t rich. It is a plea to everyone, voters included, to stop using “tax haven” to mean a sin if you do it and sound tax savings practice if I do it. If we can get past that we might get somewhere in finding more balanced tax payment systems.

Here’s the US Government Audit Office (GAO) definition of the term, and keep in mind the list of countries mentioned above:

“There is no agreed-upon definition of a tax haven or agreed-upon list of jurisdictions that should be considered tax havens. However,various governmental, international, and academic sources used similar characteristics to define and identify tax havens. Some of the characteristics included no or nominal taxes; a lack of effective exchange of information with foreign tax authorities; and a lack of transparency in legislative, legal, or administrative provisions.”

This isn’t too far from the OECD one that has caused Switzerland trouble in the past two to three years: “factors to be considered are:

• Whether there is a lack of transparency
• Whether there are laws or administrative practices that prevent the effective exchange of information for tax purposes with other governments on taxpayers benefiting from the no or nominal taxation.
• Whether there is an absence of a requirement that the activity be substantial.”

For the record, I’ve paid taxes in four countries where I’ve lived and while there is room for improvement, I’d put Switzerland at the top of the fair tax list and the US at the bottom. A bonus: it takes me just an hour to do my family’s taxes in Switzerland.