For your reading pleasure, here is Notice 2009-62.  If you have signature power over a foreign financial account but the money isn’t yours, then you have an extension of time to deal with the “Come to Jesus!” clean-up and file all of your paperwork with the IRS. If this applies to your particular situation, it [...]

Up to now the FBAR amnesty processing dance has been: Step 1. Go to your local IRS Criminal Investigations office. Get cleared there. Step 2. Get your file sent to the IRS Philadelphia unit, where most things international seem to happen. This is where your taxes, penalties, and interest would be calculated. I know it [...]

Jack Townsend does a better job at parsing the results than I ever will. Go to Jack’s blog post and read all about it. As Rufus Rhoades tells me every time we have lunch, “It’s only money.” Mr. Get-In-Line-Brother, Jeff Chernick, learns this lesson late in life (at age 70). As the game show used [...]

The IRS process for starting an amnesty application for an offshore bank account has an interesting thing in it. You tell me: sneaky or sloppy? The process up to now The process for an amnesty application up to now has been pretty clean. Start the voluntary disclosure process, go all the way to the end, [...]

The IRS is changing the way this is done.  My guess?  Too much paperwork.  They need triage to sort the voluntary disclosures into the “Woo hoo! We landed a big one!” pile and the “Meh, that’s boring!” pile. We have finally migrated to a formal letter with actual information being asked.  This should eliminate the [...]