Jacqueline B. Bugnion has been a member of ACA since 1995 and currently serve's on it Executive Board and as Controller. Born in 1941 in the U.S., Jacqueline grew up in Lakewood, Ohio. In 1962 Jacqueline graduated with a B.A. from Cornell University and in 1964 received her MBA from Harvard Business School. After working at McKinsey and Company in New York, Jacqueline moved to Switzerland with her Swiss husband in 1964 where she worked in the watch industry for several years and in the promotional office of the Canton of Neuchatel. 1980 Jacqueline and her family moved to Geneva where she worked in the banking industry before joining the Bolton Group, a European group manufacturing and marketing consumer products, where she worked for eleven years and became Group Financial Controller. Jacqueline and her husband have two children and enjoy spending time managing their small family-run vignoble in Perroy, Switzerland. As well as serving on the Executive Committee in 2004, Jackie participated in the 2004 Overseas Americans Week in Washington.
Michael Larsen, a member of ACA's Executive Committee and native of Southern California, is Managing Director of Sales and Marketing at Harbert Management Corporation, a U. S.-based asset manager. He has lived in Geneva for six years, and in Switzerland for ten. Michael spent 20 years at Citigroup and Citibank, first in New York before moving to Bahrain, where for 4 years he travelled extensively across Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and North Yemen. Mike also worked in London for 6 years developing the bank's activities in Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey and the former Soviet Union prior to moving to Zurich, Switzerland. Michael is also Director and Treasurer of the Pension Education Center, a foundation engaged in the development of pension systems for developing markets. Michael, graduated in Economics from Boston University and is fluent in French and German, went to public high school in Luxembourg and graduated from the International School of Geneva. He and Corinne, his French wife of nearly 22 years, have two teenage children, Julie (18) and Thomas (16). Both are bilingual and bi-nationals, and when asked where they came from often respond "Airport Arrivals Hall A". Along with serving on the ACA Executive Committee in 2004, Mike was also responsible for coordinating the production of the Special Edition Voter Registration Newsletter.
Though the setting was informal, the presentation of our agenda items was focused and professional. ACA members present worked effectively as a team, each taking their turn, based on the variety of their experiences, to carefully build a coherent and compelling portrait of the negative impact of current U.S. policies on Americans living overseas. The focus centered especially on the double taxation of Americans working overseas, citizenship rights passing from parent to child and, social security and Medicare benefits.
Ambassador Willeford listened attentively, asking questions that demonstrated a genuine interest in understanding our concerns, and took a number of notes on points that were made during our discussion. She volunteered her point of view and expressed her appreciation in being informed of the many issues we had brought forward.
At the conclusion of the luncheon, Ambassador Willeford was presented with an honorary life membership to ACA.
It is difficult to objectively rate the success or impact of such a meeting, however, one very positive note was that Ambassador Willeford expressed a desire to keep an open line of communication between her office and ACA and she was open to discussing at future venues how her office could help raise awareness of our issues in the United States. The meeting has already provided benefits in the form of contacts for our Overseas American Week, scheduled for May 2005.