How Many People Are Really Renouncing U.S. Citizenship? (Mass Media is Wrong)
- Parviz Malakouti-Fitzgerald, Esq.
- 18 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Parviz Malakouti-Fitzgerald, Esq.
Every year, when the topic of Americans renouncing citizenship makes its rounds in the financial press, you will find the same statistic cited in Forbes, CNN, Yahoo, and dozens of other outlets. The number almost inevitably comes from the same source. And the interpretation of that number is wrong.
Not wrong in a minor, rounding-error kind of way. It’s wrong in a way that should fundamentally disqualify it as a measure of U.S. citizenship renunciations. Here is why.
Article Outline:
The Federal Register Quarterly List: What It Actually Measures
The figure cited by virtually every mainstream publication is drawn from the Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate, published in the Federal Register.
On its face, the name sounds right. Expatriations. That is what we are trying to count, right?
The problem is the legal definition of “expatriation” used for purposes of this list is not limited to U.S. citizens who renounce or relinquish citizenship. Under IRC §877A, the term also captures long-term residents, defined under IRC §877(e)(1) and (2) as individuals who held U.S. legal permanent residence for at least eight of the last 15 years and who have abandoned that status. Those individuals are supposed to be included on the quarterly Federal Register list alongside actual U.S. citizens.
Now for the obvious: Legal permanent residents are not U.S. citizens.
They are "green card holders.". Counting their abandonments alongside citizenship renunciations produces a figure that is simply not what the headlines claim it is.
Making matters worse, the Federal Register list provides no indicator of which category any given name falls into. There is no column distinguishing citizens from long-term residents.
So when a quarterly list publishes 1,200 names, there is no way to determine exclusively from the document itself whether 1,000 of them are citizens, 600 of them are citizens, or virtually none of them are. The list does not say.
The Second Problem: Covered vs. Non-Covered Expatriates
There is a second variable layered on top of the first. The Federal Register list is supposed to include both covered expatriates, those who owe an exit tax under IRC §877A, and non-covered expatriates, those who do not meet the income, asset, or compliance thresholds that trigger the exit tax. In practice, there are longstanding anecdotal reports from practitioners that non-covered expatriates are frequently omitted from the list.
Whether that is happening systematically and at what rate is not publicly documented. But it introduces another source of distortion into a figure already compromised by the citizen-versus-resident confusion.
What the Number Should Actually Be
If the goal is to count how many U.S. citizens have relinquished citizenship, the best available metric is the number of Certificates of Loss of Nationality (“CLNs”) approved by the U.S. Department of State.
A CLN is issued only to citizens. Long-term residents who abandon their green cards do not receive one. That eliminates the first and most significant flaw in the Federal Register list entirely. Additionally, CLNs are issued to both covered and non-covered citizen expatriates without distinction, which resolves the second variable as well.
Renunciation under 8 U.S.C. §1481(a)(5) is one of several statutory expatriating acts that can result in the issuance of a CLN. The CLN count captures the full universe of those acts once the individual has requested proof of the relinquishment from the U.S. government, making it a far more accurate proxy for the real number of U.S. citizens who have relinquished citizenship.
Another Limitation to Both Counting Methods
One limitation applies equally to both the Federal Register list and the CLN count. Under U.S. law, a person can commit an expatriating act, wait years before applying for a CLN, and if approved, have the CLN backdated to the date of the original act. Someone who relinquished citizenship in 2015 but did not apply for a CLN until 2024 was technically not a U.S. citizen during that entire nine-year window, but their relinquishment would appear in neither count - the quarterly expatriation list nor the list of approved CLNs - until the CLN was issued and approved. The paper follows the loss of status. Sometimes that paper comes much later. So, neither counting method captures that population cleanly.
That is an acknowledged limitation of any effort to quantify relinquishments and it is not a reason to prefer the Federal Register list over the CLN count. It is simply a ceiling on how precise any available figure can be.
The FOIA Data
The inconvenience with using CLN approvals as the proper metric is that the State Department does not proactively publish that data, unlike the Federal Register quarterly list. However, the State Department is subject to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), and those figures can be requested.
Malakouti Law submitted FOIA requests for the number of CLNs approved in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. The responses returned figures of 4,798 for fiscal year 2022 and 6,615 for fiscal year 2023. Granted, FOIA responses from federal agencies cannot be treated as perfectly reliable figures. Agencies can make errors, and responses are not always fully responsive to the request. But these numbers, obtained directly from the agency that issues CLNs, are a significantly more meaningful data point than the Federal Register quarterly list. FOIA requests for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 are currently pending.
Why This Matters
The problem with the Federal Register list is not just that one or two outlets made an honest mistake. It is that the error has been repeated so many times by sources with enough authority that downstream writers simply treat it as settled. The public thinks that if Forbes cites it, it must be right.
In reality, Forbes is actually wrong. Through sloppy journalism or otherwise, the figure gets unqualifiedly repeated until the misconception becomes calcified, which appears to be the current state of affairs as of the date of this article.
For practitioners such as John Richardson of Citizenship Solutions or Anthony Parent of IRS Medic who focus on issues of loss of nationality, the flaws in the CFR list are well understood. Unfortuantely, it appears the same cannot be said across the broader immigration bar, and it is certainly not reflected in mainstream financial and news coverage of this topic. The average American reading these articles doesn't know about the fatal flaw of the figure used in the Federal Register quarterly list.
The number of Americans relinquishing U.S. citizenship is a legitimate and important data point for individuals thinking about their own citizenship planning, as well as the broader American public.
Let’s use real numbers or include highly legible critical caveats when not using the real numbers.
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