Under I.R.C. §911, if certain conditions are met, a qualified individual can exclude his foreign earned income from taxable gross income for the U.S. income tax purposes. This income may still be subject to U.S. Social Security taxes. The income exclusion amount for 2010 has increased to $91,500.

In this article, I will discuss five most important issues that you need to know before you sign a fee agreement with international tax lawyers in Minneapolis. * How is the international tax lawyer’s fee paid? There are three main models of payment that lawyers use: hourly fee, contingency fee, and flat fee. The hourly [...]

The FBAR must be filed by June 30 of each relevant year, including this year (2010).

U.S. citizens and resident aliens (for U.S. tax purposes) who have financial interest in Canadian Registered Retirements Savings Plans RRSPs)and/or Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIFs) must report their RRSP and RRIF income to the IRS by using Form 8891. The taxpayers (even if resident aliens from Canada) must comply with this reporting requirement even if [...]

Since October of 2008, the definition of a “U.S. person” has been going through a turbulent phase of uncertainty with periodic expansions and retractions. The pre-2008 FBAR instructions (dating back to July of 2000 version) defined the “U.S. person” broadly as: “(1) a citizen or resident of the United States, (2) a domestic partnership, (3) [...]

In this essay, I would like to explore the relationship between the self-employment tax and the tax exclusion of income earned by the U.S. businesses abroad. The self-employment tax is a social security and Medicare tax on net earnings from self-employment. A self-employed U.S. citizen or resident must pay self-employment tax if his net earnings [...]

On December 9, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives approved H.R. 4213, the “Tax Extenders Act of 2009.” The bill would extend for one more year more than forty tax provisions that are set to expire at the end of this year, including the research credit and a number of important tax breaks for individuals. [...]

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, each United States person must file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (the “FBAR”) with the U.S. Department of Treasury if two conditions apply.

The first condition is that the U.S. person must have either a financial interest in or signature authority (or other comparable authority)over one or more financial accounts in a foreign country. Several clarifications are necessary in order to understand the applicability of this first condition. First, for the purposes of the FBAR, the definition of a “U.S. person” includes U.S. citizens, U.S. residents, and persons in, and doing business in, the United States. “Person” is defined to include not only individuals, but also all forms of business entities, trusts, and estates.

When dealing with the international transactions, the United States tax law usually divides income into two broad categories: foreign source income and the U.S. source income. The determination of whether the income is foreign or U.S. in origin depends on a set of rules – the source-of-income rules – created by Congress, elaborated by the U.S. Treasury regulations, refined in courts, and further modified by the international treaties. While jurisdictional in nature, the income source rules are fundamentally and critically important to the understanding and operation of international transactions, primarily because these rules generate real operational consequences that affect a variety of substantive U.S. tax provisions. For the purposes of this essay, these consequences may be classified according to the grouping of the affected taxpayers.

Under I.R.C. §911, a U.S. citizen or resident can elect to exclude as much as $91,400 (for tax year 2009) of foreign earned income and some or all foreign housing costs from taxable gross income if two conditions are met.