I thought I mostly had the hang of things. I’ve lived in a foreign country for over three years now; hell, I’ve even moved house within it. I’ve lived here through a European Championship, two Olympic games, a French presidential election and then a U.S. one, and last year I did our taxes for both countries all on my own. The surprises are few and far between these days.
So I was perversely kind of excited about the 2010 Census, because that’s really rare. Would a form come all the way here in the mail? The federal government certainly knows where to find us on tax day (as does the State of New York, like that annoying coworker who goes around asking everyone if they owe him money just in case he forgot a debt somehow).
I waited, adding a week for international shipping and then a second one for French mail forwarding from our Paris address, and then a third in case my government really was about to suddenly remember me. I checked the mail, ignored freak-outs by conspiracy theorists, and even explained the census concept to a French guy in the woods with a ten-month-old border collie.
Finally I concluded that this was going to be one of those times when geography meant that I would simply have to go a little above and beyond, and I Googled the census and went to the website that tells you all about it, to find out how to download my form.
We don’t count.
I had to read it a few times myself before it sank in, so I’ll say it again: we don’t count in the United States Census, because we live outside of the U.S. and are not employed by the U.S. government in any capacity. Just because of that, they don’t even feel the need to know that we’re out here.
You could make an argument that this should absolve us from an American tax obligation, but unfortunately you could make many of the same arguments to prove that any kind of federal taxation is unconstitutional. Which is to say: you’d have a great case, but don’t expect it to matter much on April 15, which is about what I’d expect to happen if I mailed a blank 1040-ES in with a copy of Article One, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution and a print-out of the relevant page of the Census website.
Still, it’s a fairly jarring sort of anti-climax, and I’m not pleased with this discovery at all. Oh, well…there’s a World Cup coming on, so that’ll just have to fill the void for now.