Gift tax in the United States
If a person is a non-resident alien for purposes of gift tax, taxation of gifts is determined in a different way. If the property is not located in the U.S., there is no gift tax. If it is intangible property, such as shares in U.S. corporations and interests in partnerships or LLCs, there is no gift tax.
Accidental American
Like the United States, many other countries have laws for transmission of citizenship by descent, but those countries impose tax filing obligations only on people who reside or earn income in those countries; the United States and Eritrea are the only countries which impose taxation and reporting requirements on the income which citizens living abroad permanently earn in their countries of residence. Despite their lack of personal or business ties to the United States, accidental Americans have the same U.S. tax filing and payment obligations as do self-identifying "Americans abroad" who are aware of their U.S. citizenship status, and are subject to the same fines for failure to file. Tax treaties generally do not serve to mitigate the double taxation and filing burdens such people face, as all U.S. tax treaties give the U.S. the power to tax U.S. citizens residing in other countries as if the treaty did not exist; such treaties generally only benefit business entities and dual-resident non-U.S. citizens. The result, as tax attorney Gavin Leckie put it, is that "people who have no sense of being American find themselves caught up in a maze of rules really aimed at the U.S. resident citizen seeking to defer or evade U.S. taxes by holding assets offshore".