In 2014, Fabien Lehagre was 29 when he received a letter from his bank that left him in “shock.” For one thing, Lehagre was a French citizen living in France; there was no reason, he thought, that his bank should be requesting his U.S. Social Security number—at the time, he wasn’t even aware he had one.
The bigger shock in the letter, though, came when the bank informed Lehagre he could be a “potential tax evader,” because he had never filed income tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service. Lehagre had been born in the U.S. to an American mother and French father, but had not lived there since he was 18 months old. He does not speak English (he spoke to Fortune via ChatGPT translation) and has never worked in the U.S.
