FBAR

A foreign life insurance or annuity policy with a cash value is an other financial account for FBAR purposes, reportable once your foreign accounts combined pass $10,000. The number you report is the cash surrender value, never the death benefit. Pure term insurance is different: with no cash value, there is no balance to hold […]

Money sitting offshore is not automatically an FBAR account. The report reaches bank accounts, securities accounts, and the other financial accounts the regulation defines, so a platform balance reports only when it fits one of those categories. United States v. Hom is the anchor: on those facts, a foreign money transmitter account was a reportable

Under FinCEN Notice 2020-2, a foreign account holding only virtual currency is not currently defined as a reportable FBAR account. Add fiat balances, tokenized securities, or any other reportable asset, and the account becomes reportable under the existing rules. FinCEN has said it intends to amend the regulations to change this, so this page carries

Yes. A U.S. person who is not the tax owner of a foreign non-grantor trust can still owe FBARs through signature or other authority over the trust’s accounts: bank mandates, online banking rights, and powers the institution will act on. Giving assets to the trust does not always give away the FBAR. The answer lives

Forms 3520 and 3520-A report your relationship to a foreign trust: distributions received, gifts, and trust ownership, under the tax code. The FBAR asks a different question under a different law: who has financial interest in, or authority over, the trust’s actual accounts. Filing the trust forms never ends the account analysis. Six actors surround

Your business can owe its own FBAR. U.S. persons include domestic corporations, partnerships, LLCs, trusts, and estates, so a U.S. company with foreign accounts files for itself once those accounts top $10,000 combined. That filing never covers you. Majority owners and account signers carry separate, personal FBAR obligations over the same accounts, and the usual

A disregarded entity is disregarded by the tax code, not by FinCEN. Form 8858 reports the foreign disregarded entity or branch to the IRS; the FBAR separately reports the foreign accounts connected to that structure, under Title 31 financial interest and signature rules. For tax, the entity’s account may effectively be yours already. For the

You can owe an FBAR on money that was never yours. Signature or other authority, the ability to control the disposition of an account’s funds by communicating directly with the institution, creates the filing requirement with zero ownership. Treasurers, controllers, foreign subsidiary signers, trustees, and family members holding account powers get caught. Read-only access, bookkeeping,

Form 5471 reports a foreign corporation to the IRS: ownership, earnings, and transactions, under the Internal Revenue Code. It never reports the corporation’s bank accounts to FinCEN. The FBAR is the separate report for those accounts, and it reaches U.S. persons three ways: indirect financial interest through majority ownership, signature authority for officers who can

Colombian financial products do not map one to one onto U.S. reporting labels. Each product gets placed into an FBAR category first: bank account, securities account, other financial account, pension arrangement, or non-account asset. Checking and savings accounts, CDTs, comisionista brokerage accounts, fiduciaria products, and AFP pensions each carry their own analysis, and every reportable