My quest is to make it easy for you to figure out the basic stuff. Send me the hard problems. Here’s a basic one. It applies to individuals who are not citizens of the United States but they intend to spend time in the United States. How do they figure out whether the U.S. will [...]

The U.S. government requires “U.S. persons” to file Form TD F 90-22.1 (PDF) to report ownership or control of financial accounts located outside the United States. Nonresidents of the United States will be pleased to know that stealth changes to this Form now may also impose this filing requirement on them. A “U.S. person” is [...]

The United States has a gift tax: if you give something to someone, you have to pay the U.S. government for the privilege. Yes there are a ton of exceptions and weird rules. This is tax law after all. But you’d be surprised who gets tangled up in the gift tax law. Consider this one. [...]

I got an inquiry today from my FIRPTA.com website that I figured would be worth answering here, because it is a topic of general application. The question is whether using a foreign corporation works to protect against U.S. estate tax. Foreign corporations to hold U.S. real estate Nonresident investors frequently hold U.S. real estate using [...]

Today I gave an all-day course on U.S. taxation of nonresident investors in U.S. real estate. (Link is to the next time I’m giving this course — in San Jose on January 6, 2009). The course was sponsored by the Cal CPA Education Foundation. It was at the Sheraton in Anaheim, hard by Disneyland. No, [...]