[remembermylo]

I read an article a while ago that said for high net worth individuals there is a backlog of people waiting for US to process giving up US citizenship, US is under no obligation to hurry processing.

Quick google search shows articles citing "30,000 backlog" of people wanting appointments to cancel.

[post_break]

This reminds me of the insane backlog of FBI background checks for NFA items (suppressors, machine guns, SBRs). Government has no incentive to process these things in a timely matter. People have to contact their congressmen sometimes just to push the sludge along. From what I've read it's not even a different background check than when you buy a gun either, just that the extra steps and the willful laziness to slowdown something the government probably doesn't like doing but has to.

You can buy a gun in 15 minutes at a gun store normally. Want to put a suppressor on it or that gun just happens to be 1" shorter than 16"? You're going to wait 9-24 months longer. Ridiculous doesn't even begin to describe it.

[int_19h]

Government as a whole does have an incentive to process these things fast enough to avoid a backlog, since they get $200 for every transfer.

The problem is that government is so large that, in practice, the ATF doesn't care, because that $200 just goes into the US Treasury general fund. If they actually kept most of the tax they collect, I think we'd see much faster processing times, and eFile would have happened many years ago.

[synu]

Most embassies have been canceling and not scheduling these appointments, since 2019. The wait at a lot of them is still several years. I had to travel to Azerbaijan to get it done in a timely fashion.