EU Public Hearing on FATCA

Victoria Ferauge alerted me to the EU public hearing on FATCA coming up this Tuesday, 28 May from 3:30-5pm (Central European Std Time), which is 9:30 am Eastern Standard.  Victoria says:

Given my experience with the OECD, I wanted to be very sure this time around that "public" meant real people could attend. So I sent an email to MEP Sophie in't Veld (many thanks to Mark who passed along her email address).  This was her answer:
Dear Mrs Ferauge,
Thank you for your message. The meetings are public, so you can attend freely. The meeting will also be webstreamed via http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/committees/
With kind regards,
Sophie in 't Veld, MEP

It will be interesting to see how this goes and I very much look forward to Victoria's impressions.  By now FATCA's reach is beginning to be understood by a broader audience, but much (well-founded) fear and confusion remains due to the conflation of tax cheats hiding cash in complicated offshore schemes with Americans living abroad who are just trying to live their lives. I do hope that this public meeting will help clarify things.