Ace Frehley, the former lead guitarist with KISS, has opened up about the reason why he has not been able to perform in Europe for a long time. In an interview with Chaos Zine, a Finnish music website, Frehley admitted that he owes a large amount of money to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the U.S. federal tax agency, and that has prevented him from renewing his passport.
"I’ve been having issues with renewing my passport because I have some problems with the IRS and it’s not really the passport bureau but the IRS. Since I owe the IRS a couple of hundred grand, and they just instituted a new law that if you owe more than $50,000, they won’t renew your passport,” Frehley said.
The law that Frehley referred to is the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which was enacted in 2015 and allows the State Department to deny, revoke, or limit the passport of any U.S. citizen who has a seriously delinquent tax debt of more than $50,000.
Frehley expressed his hope that he will be able to resolve his tax issue soon and return to the European stage. “Luckily, I have some really smart attorneys working on it, and there are ways around it, so hopefully, I might be able to get my passport within two or three weeks. If that happens, I will be in Europe this summer. If it doesn’t happen, I will be in Europe next summer,” he said.
[Source: Classic Hits Today]