In the quaint English village of Little Wigginsworth, where the biggest excitement was the annual cheese-rolling race, a small group of American expats had settled in comfortably. They'd traded in the hustle and bustle of their homeland for the calm and charming life of the English countryside. Life was good, tea was plentiful, and the only thing they ever had to worry about was whether it would rain during the village fete.
That is, until the day Betsy Thompson received a letter.
It was a Tuesday morning, and Betsy was enjoying a quiet breakfast of toast and marmalade when the postman slid an ominous-looking envelope through the door. The return address read "Internal Revenue Service." Her heart sank. She’d hoped that moving across the Atlantic had freed her from the clutches of the IRS, but apparently, they’d found her.
She tore it open and read the first line: "Notice of Failure to File U.S. Tax Return." Betsy’s eyes widened in horror.
“Oh no,” she whispered, clutching the letter. “Oh no, no, no.”
By lunchtime, the rest of the American expats in Little Wigginsworth had gathered in Betsy’s living room, the IRS letter lying in the centre of the table like a ticking time bomb.
“How can they still want our taxes? We don’t even live there!” exclaimed Tim Johnson, a former New Yorker who had moved to Little Wigginsworth to escape the stress of city life.
“Apparently, they don’t care,” said Betsy, pacing back and forth. “Something about ‘citizenship-based taxation.’”
“I thought we escaped all this when we moved here!” added Susan Miller, a Bostonian who now spent her days making scones and pretending she understood cricket.
“They’re like tax zombies!” declared Dave, a Californian who had spent the last two years trying to introduce the concept of a “proper taco” to the locals. “They just keep coming, no matter where you run!”
“Okay, let’s not panic,” said Betsy, trying to regain control of the situation. “We just need to file our returns and everything will be fine.”
“But I don’t even understand US taxes when I’m living there!” cried Susan. “How am I supposed to figure it out now?”
This was a fair point. US tax laws were notorious for being incomprehensible, even to people who dealt with them regularly. But the added confusion of living abroad brought an entirely new level of absurdity to the process.
“Don’t forget about FATCA,” said Tim ominously.
“Fat cat?” asked Dave. “Is that the one where they tax your pets?”
“No, no,” groaned Tim. “The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. We have to report all our foreign bank accounts!”
“But I only have a checking account with the Wigginsworth Savings Bank,” said Betsy. “And it’s got, like, 300 pounds in it!”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Tim, shaking his head. “You have to report it.”
“What about the FEIE?” Susan chimed in.
“The what?”
“The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion! I think we can exclude some of our income because we live outside the US.”
Dave scratched his head. “Wait, so we’re excluding income, reporting foreign bank accounts, and we still have to pay taxes? How does that make any sense?”
“It doesn’t,” Tim sighed. “It’s the IRS.”
Hours later, after much Googling, swearing, and several cups of strong tea (with a bit of something stronger added), the group managed to compile their necessary forms for american taxes abroad. There was Form 2555 for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, Form 8938 for foreign accounts, Form 1116 for the Foreign Tax Credit, and a few others they didn’t fully understand but decided to fill out just in case.
As they huddled around the kitchen table, they realised they had a new problem.
“How do we send this to the IRS?” asked Betsy. “You can’t just mail it from here, can you?”
They stared at the mountain of paperwork, each form thicker than a good English novel. They imagined it getting lost somewhere over the Atlantic, or worse, being opened by some unfortunate postal worker who’d never seen anything so complicated in their life.
“I think we need a professional,” said Dave finally.
“You mean an accountant?” asked Susan.
“I mean an exorcist,” Dave replied. “To banish the IRS from our lives once and for all!”
They all laughed, though it was the kind of laugh that teetered on the edge of hysteria.
In the end, they found an American tax accountant who travels around the UK and who specialised in expat returns. They sent her their forms, their confusion, and a hefty fee, hoping she could untangle the mess and keep them out of jail.
A few weeks later, they received confirmation that their returns had been filed. The accountant had managed to wrangle their taxes into submission, using a combination of legal wizardry and sheer determination. They were safe—for now.
Relief washed over the Little Wigginsworth Americans. They could go back to their peaceful lives, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be hauled back to the US in handcuffs for failing to report their modest earnings from the village craft fair.
But the ordeal left a lasting impression on them. Every April, they gathered in the village pub to toast their victory over the IRS and share stories of their tax-filing nightmares. And every year, they made the same vow:
“We should really just become British citizens.”
But they never did, because deep down, they knew that some things were universal—like the inevitability of taxes, no matter where you lived.
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