Your help is needed this week! Contact your Members of Congress and ask them to read the 2022 Update on Tax and Financial Access Issues of Americans Abroad. This report is based on the 7,000 Americans abroad who filled in the tax survey in April this year, so this is helping your voice be heard in Congress! Now that the report is available, your help is needed to make sure that all Members of Congress are made aware of it and receive a copy.
This action will only take *20 minutes* and will greatly help us advance our advocacy goals!
Click here to watch a quick video on how to participate in this campaign to help you save time.
Follow these 3 Steps -
1. Find your 2 Senators and 1 House Representative's Washington D.C. office phone numbers
- Click here and search for the last address you lived at in the U.S. or your U.S. voting address (if you've never lived in the U.S., use the last address your American parent(s) lived).
- The page should list the Washington D.C. phone numbers for all three of your Members of Congress (they will start with area code 202).
2. **CALL** their offices
We want you to call, not email, because calling is generally more effective than emailing to get the correct name.
- When the receptionist answers the phone read the following script:
Hi, my name is [insert your name here], I am a constituent and I would like to send a copy of a recently released report on tax problems for Americans abroad to the person in charge of tax on the Congress[wo/man]'s legislative team. This is an issue that matters to me since I live abroad in [country]. Do you know who would be the best person to send a copy of the report to?
Tips:
- If you don't have a usual method of calling the US, we recommend adding the minimum credit (usually about $5) to a Skype account so you can call through any device connected to the Internet. This will greatly reduce your costs to make an international call.
- You'll need to call during Washington D.C. office hours to increase the chances of you getting a person to answer the phone, between 9am to 5pm ET on weekdays.
- The person on the phone should then give you the email address for the correct person of staff in charge of tax legislation.
- If when you call, the phone goes to voicemail or no one answers, try again another time, don't leave a voicemail. If you call up to 3 different times and you don't have any luck email us on [email protected] and we'll see if we can help.
- If you don't have time to call all 3 and you only want to make 1 call, then call your House representative.
3. Now send 3 separate emails!
- Copy, paste, and customize the following email (send the same email to each Member of Congress, do not just send one email to all 3).
- And attach to each email the one page summary and report here.
To: Tax staff email
Cc: [email protected] (this is very important, don't forget to cc us so that we know that you contacted your reps! This helps us track who contacted whom.)
Dear [Tax staff's first and last name],
My name is [your name], I am a proud constituent living in [city and country you live in].
[Please add your own personal story about how you've been impacted by tax and financial access issues. The more personal, the better.]
Solutions to these issues of concern to the estimated nine million(!) Americans abroad are non-controversial and bipartisan. With the 118th Congress just around the corner, fixing these problems could garner bipartisan support.
Please find attached a one pager and copy of a recently released report on Americans abroad tax and financial access issues. Can you please add this report to your records? Can you also include this in the briefing material for the Congress[wo/man] for the next Congress?
Thanks,
[Your name]
If you do not receive a reply in 24 hours, send a follow-up email asking for them to confirm that they received your email for their records (which will only take 1-2 minutes of your time):
- If the Congressional staff requests additional information or wants to do a call with you about the report but you're not confident in doing this, reply and cc in [email protected] and say that someone in Democrats Abroad will be happy to speak with them.
- If you receive any reply, please forward it to [email protected] so Democrats Abroad knows how the member's office responds to your request.
- Don't be afraid to message them on all their social media platforms to ask if they saw your email too - offices are very busy and get hundreds of emails a day so this helps bump your email up to the top of their inbox.
- If you can't send an attachment to your email, use these links to share the report:
- For the report: https://www.democratsabroad.org/taxreportpdf
- And for the one pager: https://www.democratsabroad.org/taxreportonepagerpdf
Click here to watch a quick video on how to participate in this campaign to help you save time!
That's it! Thank you so much for helping us with this very important work. If you have any questions on this action, please email us at [email protected].
Feel free to share this website page with anyone you think is interested in helping fix the tax problems for Americans abroad!