1,335 Americans give up passports in first quarter of 2015

The US Internal Revenue Service has announced an increase over the number of Americans living abroad who decided to renounce their citizenship.

A total of 1,335 Americans renounced their citizenship in the first quarter of 2015, which is 18 percent higher than the previous record, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

The figure comes after 3,415 Americans gave up their passports in 2014.

Americans living outside the US renounce their citizenship due to the country’s tax laws.

The US is the only country within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside.

About six million American citizens are living abroad.

The surge is tied to a 2010 law that gives the Internal Revenue Service access to US citizens’ foreign bank accounts.

Tax laws were rarely enforced for decades, but scrutiny of Americans abroad is intensifying because of the country’s budget deficit that spiked after the Great Recession.

The campaign was intended to target American taxpayers who hide assets in secret foreign accounts in order to pay less taxes, but it also complicated the financial lives of the US citizens living abroad.

Earlier this year, the mayor of London, who holds dual US-British nationality, decided to renounce his American citizenship, citing his bid to run for the UK’s premiership.

“The reason I’m thinking I probably will want to make a change is that my commitment is, and always has been, to Britain,” Boris Johnson said.

However, Johnson’s aides were cited in local media reports as saying that the mayor’s top priority in abandoning his American citizenship was a bid to avoid paying more taxes to US authorities after had recently been forced to settle a large capital gains tax payment statement.

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