America Made Me A Citizen Without Consent, Then Terrorized Me With Paperwork

Bureaucracy? Meet childhood trauma.

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The passport of a freshly minted dual US/UK citizen, unwittingly saddled at birth with additional annual obligations which will cost £2,000 to escape.

America, the Land of the Free, is hard on its citizens. Have you seen? People in America get prison sentences of 200 years. Except rapists. They get elected to senior positions in the judiciary and government.

Look, there's a lot to love about the country. My year in the Bay Area, aged 7, was memorable. My 2016 drive up the Pacific coastline from San Francisco to Ashland, Oregon, infused me with joy. Plus, have you ever met friendlier serving staff? Nothing motivates kindness to customers more effectively than the fact that you rely on tips to meet your basic living expenses. Sure, the healthcare system is barbaric. The ads are shouty. But the landscapes are monumental. And I have family there: my jolly-ex-RAF uncle, kind-as-a-warm-flannel aunt, and cousins I wish I knew better.

But my word, the Land of the Free doesn't live up to its name when it comes to bureaucracy. Those tax return forms? Absolute killers. Genuinely, each year when April comes around, I start to die a little inside. Here we go again, spending a week where I could have been creating delicious fictional worlds or powerful arguments, trying to understand every incomprehensible sentence of officialese, and how to answer accurately (under fear of swingeing penalties) with the help of numerous websites (and this year, asking AI). I don't know if it's a cultural barrier, language barrier, or what, but I have four degrees and I swear I don't know how the "average American" survives this shit.

I suspect US tax returns are nightmarishly complicated purely in the cause of the Great God Capitalism and a scheme for full employment; so Byzantine and terrifying that you have to employ a US tax specialist (at considerable cost) to fill them in on your behalf, just so you can (in my case, because I already pay tax in the UK) pay absolutely nothing. It takes days. It makes me anxious. And with three stress-related auto-immune conditions, it is something I don’t need in my life.

So this week, thirteen months after applying for an appointment, I visited the US Embassy at Nine Elms in London to renounce my US citizenship. A simple task which was nevertheless extremely expensive and swallowed the whole day, in character with my entire relationship with the US government. I mean, that is why we're breaking up.

So of course it also morphed into a Personal Growth Opportunity.

I thought I'd planned ahead. I'd packed my bag the night before. Included everything I needed. Pre-booked my (expensive, rush-hour) travel. (Got that wrong, as it turned out, I cost myself an additional £14 on a non-refundable advance ticket home I couldn't use because the process took so long. Of course it did.)

But what hadn't I done? I hadn't re-read the original appointment confirmation email from a couple of months ago. I hadn't gone through that in detail.

Just as I’m pulling up at Victoria station, I check it (oh, NOW you check it) and see that it’s asking me to bring a physical copy of the form I'd sent them. FFS! I google a printer close to Victoria station and find one which is a 5-minute run (yes, I ran) around the corner. Luckily, I had booked an earlier train to give me plenty of leeway, but now I am eating up that leeway... and nor is it plain sailing from there. Of course not. Because I am in stress mode, not aligned mode.

The friendly guy in the shop says Here's the Wifi, connect to that and you can send it directly to the printer. I connect, but I can see no print button on the Dropbox phone app. There’s an 'open with' option, but I don't have a PDF reader on my phone. I download a copy of Acrobat Reader and sign up on the spot for a 7-day free trial, to be billed at £69.99 in 7 days. (Don’t worry, I remembered to cancel).

After paging through irritating welcome screens I don't need right now, still no visible print option. What next? He says, Email it to me and I'll print it.

I email it. He receives it.

—It's £1 a page.

—No worries, it's only a couple of pages.

—It's 18.

Of course it is. Six pages of form, twelve pages of instructions. A form marked on its first page: “Estimated burden: 45 minutes”. This is how the Americans roll. This is exactly why I'm trying to renounce my citizenship.

Had I had time to check I would have been able to tell him which pages to select, and saved money, but I'm in a monstrous hurry, so I tell him go ahead. Eighteen pages, spewed out too slowly for comfort. £18.

I half-run back to Victoria and the tube. Half-run through the corridors, miss my turn, see the ‘Victoria line’ arrows now pointing against me and have to run back, having gained no ground at all.

Tube to Vauxhall. Half-run the 9-minute route to the US Embassy. The email said get there 15 minutes early for the security check. I am 7 minutes early. Out of breath and stressed to the eyeballs. I go to the first entrance and tell the guy I've an appointment with Renunciations. He asks for my passport. Goes in and checks it against a list. Comes out. I am not on the list.

—Name of who you are seeing?

I show him the email.

—No name, I say. “London Renunciations.” It says go to the Consular Entrance.

He scratches his head. A British policeman close by overhears and says,

—Other entrance.

I half-run to the other entrance. Big queue of non-citizens at one door, but as a (for now) American Citizen, I get the good door, the left-hand door, no queue. Security check, and only a couple of people ahead of me before the reception desk. While I'm waiting, I check the email again.

For the first time, I see another thing on the list of Things You Must Bring With You or We Will Not Be Able to Process Your Application.

Another thing I haven't brought with me. A self-addressed Special Delivery envelope, which “can be procured from any Post Office”.

But not now. Not now while I am two minutes from my scheduled appointment time, and the nearest Post Office is half a mile away.

I have to make a decision. My decision? Don't lose this damn appointment. I have no idea what they'll say if I turn up 30 minutes late. Very possibly, You Have Lost Your Appointment, Get To the Back of the One Year Queue. I am now so stressed I am struggling not to cry.

I always cry when I get this stressed. The formula:

make a mistake + authority figure = tears

And there is surely no greater authority figure than the US Government. The way they threaten and terrify their citizens on the forms they make you complete is something else. It is the whole reason I am here, trying to escape that terror.

I figure the reception person won't have the answer about whether I automatically default this process without the envelope; she is here to check your name on a list and give you a number. She does this, and I take the lift.

There, on the second floor, it's like a posh Argos. You have a number: mine is L813. There are Ls and Ps and Vs. I reckon P is for passport, V is for Visa and L? L is for Losers. These are the Losers who want to renounce their U.S. citizenship. In Posh Argos you sit on comfortable seats watching big TV screens which match person numbers to window numbers, and wait for yours to be called.

There is no apparent order. L815 and L818 get called up just after I arrive. Soon, there are 20 numbers on the screen, all at windows. Mine isn't called for 30 minutes, but apparently 30 minutes is not enough for me to get relaxed about not having the pre-paid Special Delivery envelope, the absence of which could screw my entire quest.

I have my ancient iPad with me, so I look up the possibility of buying, there and then, a Special Delivery self-address label that I could email to whoever is behind the window. But the app wants me to decide whether I want it picked up, or whether the US Consulate Officer would like to drop it off at the local convenience store, and honestly? I don't feel that’s my decision. So I leave the tab open, close my iPad and wait, attempting to breathe more deeply and calm myself down.

I seem fine until I get called to a window. Because there is something still unprocessed in me, about to ignite. The moment I speak to someone in authority from a position of feeling powerless, I am zapped back to 6 years old, and start to cry.

And my word, does the US Government make me feel powerless. They made me a citizen without consent, and then a few years ago, started pressing me to do insanely complicated paperwork for one working week every year, under the threat of massive fines.

Yes, it is a 6-year-old who opens her mouth and immediately finds herself barely able to speak. The poor official, of course, is taken aback. What is wrong?

—I'm sorry, I say, I'm stressed.

—Is it a life thing, or about this process?

—This process.

—Do you want to come back another day?

—No, no, no! That is what’s making me— no, it's just that I don't have the envelope. I don't have the self-addressed envelope.

—That's okay.

—That's okay?

—Yes, we can fix that.

—Okay. Okay, thank you.

Massive relief. Modest embarrassment.

—I'm sorry, I just find it all so stressful. This is actually why I'm renouncing my citizenship.

—Okay. If you can just confirm your name—

Our triggers are blessings. As I wrote a year ago,

A trigger is a little flag raised for your attention which marks the spot where you were hurt and says ‘you need to deal with this’.

I've had this one since I was… well, I just named the age, I guess. Whatever age you feel when the trigger hits, that's where it began. Facing my authoritarian mother, who would dish out unfair punishments for the tiniest infraction. [Context, though I didn’t know it, she was deeply unhappy].

And I know this one well. Why haven't I cleared it? Maybe because sometimes it gets me out of trouble. I can think of a few times when my (genuine) tears have caused a person in authority to bend the rules in favour of kindness. I cried myself out of a parking ticket once: I teared up, and the traffic warden tore up the ticket, even though she'd told me she couldn't.

But I am done with humiliating myself in front of authority figures (who are, these days, half my age). It is long past time to deal with this… and take the fines, if they come.

Back to Nine Elms. She takes me through the official process. They are doing a lot of this at the moment. That's why the waiting lists are so long. Even though it costs $2,350 (which, in my case, I have to add to my already considerable debts), people are renouncing in larger and larger numbers. The only other country that taxes non-resident citizens is Eritrea. Apparently, the obligation to file US tax returns was always there, but accidental Americans like me and Boris Johnson only found out we could be penalised for this quirk of our birth in the early 2010s.

I was terrified when I first heard that I was supposed to have been filing US tax returns ever since I was 18. The IRS fines due were monumental. After being informed of it by Will Self in the green room during our joint event at the British Library to launch my debut novel in 2012, I was anxious whenever I thought about.

When offered some work by Disney, and they wanted to put me on the system, I thought I would get capsized. Thankfully, the IRS were running an "amnesty" on the fines, so I could come forward and get an SSN, penalty-free, so long as I completed tax returns for the last three years. My intention from the beginning was to get five years of returns (the minimum for renunciation) and renounce. I wanted my life to be simple again. But the cost was prohibitive.

The administrative burden is profound. And not just the tax returns. The US Government are influential enough that though I am a British Citizen of British parents, and have never lived anywhere but the UK my entire adult life, I am now from time to time forced to do things like go in person to a branch of the bank where I have had an account for 35 years with documentary proof of citizenship.

Oh, and here's the hilarious bonus. That 18-page document? The consular official asked for it. I handed it to her on the tray that goes under the glass window.

—Is any of this different from the form you sent to us?

—No, same form.

She handed it back. Another £18 down the drain. On top of the £60 I was paying to get to London in peak hours and the day of work lost. I waited another couple of hours to swear the oath. I passed my credit card over at a third window. I was given a letter. Then it was a train home, food, and all the morning routine I’d had to skip when I’d left the house at 6.30 am. Then the dentist rang to see if they could bring my appointment forward, and all I had was an hour, only suitable for answering a few emails, not getting stuck into writing. Bye-bye day.

My forms now go to Washington to be approved, which will take a few months. If it all goes through, it will — eventually — be worth it. I figure if I live another ten years, and for those ten years I don't have to fill in a US tax return, then I have bought freedom for £175 a year. The price of freedom keeps dropping the longer I live. Freedom for my relatives, too: when I die, they won't have to deal with whatever bureaucratic nightmare my dying as an American citizen would have caused them.

I will still have the IRS to deal with, regarding my exit as a taxable entity, and I'm not looking forward to the forms. But financially, it should be okay, in that I am at a significant low in my financial fortunes, so they probably (hopefully) don't have a case to take any more of my money.

The money they apparently feel entitled to take on the basis that my Dad once helped their astronauts get to the moon.

Speaking of my new debt incurred from extracting-myself-from-a-non-consensual relationship, if I have added positively to your life in any way at all, please consider taking out a paid subscription. My inner circle get extra goodies plus my heartfelt gratitude, and as we all know, a writer’s gratitude is like a good luck charm that multiplies one’s ability to manifest lovers, cheesecake, and new sources of income. Really, try it!

Over to you

• Have you ever renounced your citizenship? Where? What was it like?

• If you are an American Citizen, do you ever think about it?

• What, my American friends, are your thoughts on US bureaucracy?

• Do you have a weird emotional reaction connected to perceived authority figures?

• Have you had your own PGO¹ this week?

Let off steam in the comments!

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Until next week. Hug someone you love.

There’s a full stop there; don’t overdo it.

1. Personal Growth Opportunity