Non Willful Certification

The FBAR and FATCA’s Form 8938 are two different reports about the same money. The FBAR goes to FinCEN, separately from your taxes, once foreign accounts top $10,000 in aggregate. Form 8938 goes to the IRS with your return, at thresholds from $50,000 to $600,000 depending on filing status and where you live. Meeting one […]

Yes, you can amend an FBAR. When the original was filed on time, the fix is mechanical, and every dollar of the account’s income was already reported, an amended FinCEN Form 114 is the whole job. The moment the correction involves unreported income or years that were never filed at all, amending alone becomes a

FBAR penalties come in two tiers. Non-willful violations run $16,536 per late report at the current inflation-adjusted rate, applied per report, not per account, under Bittner v. United States. Willful violations reach the greater of $165,353 or 50 percent of the account balance. The IRS has six years from each report’s due date to assess

Filing an FBAR late does not trigger an automatic penalty. If every dollar of your foreign income was reported and taxed, you can file the missed FinCEN Form 114 reports through the IRS delinquent procedures at no cost and with no penalty. If income went unreported, exposure starts at $16,536 per late report and streamlined

If you reported all of your foreign income on your U.S. tax returns and paid the tax on it, you can file late FBARs through the IRS Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures and the IRS will not impose a penalty. Each missed FinCEN Form 114 is filed electronically through the BSA E-Filing System with a short

Having heard of the FBAR does not make a filing failure willful. The IRS defines non-willful conduct to include negligence, inadvertence, mistake, and good-faith misunderstanding of the law. Prior awareness does make the precise misunderstanding, the effort to verify it, and any ignored warning the facts that decide how the record reads. “A guy at

A foreign accountant can be excellent under local law and never retained for U.S. filing obligations. A streamlined certification claiming professional reliance must describe the advisor’s actual role accurately: whether there was no advice, local-only advice, incorrect advice, or advice the taxpayer rejected, because each reads differently under penalties of perjury. “My contador in Medellin

Filing Form 8938 while missing the FBAR cuts both ways. The disclosure shows the assets were not hidden, and it also shows the taxpayer knew foreign reporting rules existed. Form 8938 and the FBAR are separate filings with different locations, definitions, thresholds, and coverage, and neither one satisfies the other. “My accountant put all my

A foreign corporation with no operating income can still carry Form 5471 questions. Ownership, filer category, capital activity, bank accounts, and entity classification decide the filing analysis, not the absence of revenue, and the summary filing relief for dormant corporations applies only to companies that meet all of its conditions. “The company in Costa Rica

The belief that FBAR covers only personal accounts is one of the most common explanations for missed filings, and one of the most closely examined. Whether a foreign company’s account belongs on an individual’s FBAR depends on financial interest, signature authority, entity ownership rules, and applicable exceptions, not on the account’s label. “My S.R.L. in