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FBAR Gold & Precious Metal Accounts Reporting | International Tax Lawyer & Attorney Chicago Illinois

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Hello and welcome to Sherayzen Law Office video blog. My name is Eugene Sherayzen and I’m an international tax attorney and owner of Sherayzen Law Office, Ltd.

Today, I’m continuing a series of blogs from Chicago, Illinois, United States. For some reason, that I still do not fully understand, there’s an inordinant amount of people in Chicago who came to my office with respect to FBAR compliance concerning their precious metals accounts.

This is a good time to discuss FBAR compliance concerning precious metals. If you own a gold bar or more realistically gold coins and you place them in your safe at your house, even if this house is located in Switzerland, that is not a reportable account. However, if you place your ownership of precious metals (when I say precious metals, I mean gold, silver, platinum, valuable minerals etcetera). If you place these items, these precious metals with a bank in the bank vault and there is a number that identifies your ownership of these precious metals, then this is a reportable account for FBAR purposes. Interestingly enough, it’s also a reportable account for FATCA purposes on Form 8938.

As long as there is a fiduciary relationship with respect to precious metals that you own, there will be a reportable foreign account; of course it has to be a foreign account in order to be reportable for FBAR/FATCA purposes. If you have it here somewhere in the United States, that of course would not matter and for some inexplicable reason, there has been a very large number of people from here (Chicago) who came to my office and asked me to do FBAR compliance or to do an offshore voluntary disclosure with respect to their prior FBAR noncompliance concerning their foreign precious metal accounts.

(But) I want to warn you in this video, if you have any of these accounts, you need to make sure that you are fully compliant with US international tax law with respect to FBAR compliance, with respect to FATCA compliance and with respect to foreign income reporting requirements. You have to report any income from sale of your foreign precious metal accounts or precious metals, I should say.

In the next blog, I will talk about another income tax aspect of having foreign precious metals accounts.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.

Chicago Illinois International Tax Lawyer: Link Between FATCA and IRS Offshore Voluntary Disclosure

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Hello and welcome to Sherayzen Law Office video blog. My name is Eugene Sherayzen and I’m an international tax attorney and owner of Sherayzen Law Office, Ltd.

Today, I’m continuing my series of blogs from Chicago. I’m in Grand Park in downtown Chicago. As I mentioned in a previous blog, this park has a very special meaning for me because it was precisely here where Obama made his speech and it was precisely under the Obama administration when FATCA the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the most influencial piece of legislation, in US international tax law history was passed into law.

Once of the most important things we should note about FATCA is the link between FATCA and the popularity of the various IRS voluntary disclosure programs, including OVDP, the 2009 OVDP that was put into place while FATCA was still under discussion, the 2011 OVDI, the offshore voluntary disclosure initiative – a highly successful offshore voluntary disclosure program and it was precisely highly successful because of FATCA. It was FATCA that was a major impetus for US owners of foreign accounts to bring themselves into full compliance with US international tax laws and of course the 2012 OVDP with its modification of 2014 OVDP as well as the 2014 Streamlined compliance programs: the Streamlined Domestic Offshore Procedures and Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures.

All of these voluntary disclosure programs are directly linked to FATCA. Without FATCA, they would never have been as successful as they were and US international tax rules would not have had such a big impact as they do today.

In the next blog, I will talk more about US international tax issues concerning Chicago and (the) people who live here.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.

Portland Oregon International Tax Lawyer: Streamlined Disclosure of Foreign Inheritance in Thailand

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Hello and welcome to Sherayzen Video Blog. My name is Eugene Sherayzen and I’m an international tax attorney and owner of Sherayzen Law Office, Ltd.

Today, I’m continuing a series of blogs from Portland, Oregon. As part of the series, I’m discussing the cases that I’ve handled in the past with respect to Asian Americans and Asians who became US tax residents and today I’d like to talk to you about a case from Thailand that I had a few years ago. The essence of this case is foreign inheritance.

A client came to me a few years actually after receiving a sizeable foreign inheritance. As it turns out to be the case, this was not only issue. It appears that before his death, her father actually gifted her a large number of accounts in Thailand, all of them in Thai Bahts. None of these accounts were ever disclosed to the IRS on FBAR or Form 8938. When my client came to me, we could immediately identify several problems: FBAR, Form 8938 and Form 3520. As we started digging deeper into her assets, it turns out that a large amount of her assets were invested in life insurance policies. Now, Thai life insurance policies come in two parts: Simple life insurance policies and Investment life insurance policies.

When we talk about investment-type life insurance policies, we’re talking about PFIC compliance; these are almost always foreign mutual funds that they’re invested into. In addition to all of the forms I have mentioned, we also needed to do tax compliance concerning Form 8621.

The case was not an easy one but thankfully everything went well; we’ve done our due diligence; we’ve discovered all of the accounts, identified all of the compliance issues, we’ve completed the Streamlined Domestic Offshore Procedures disclosure and the IRS accepted it. There was no follow-up audit with respect to this voluntary disclosure.

This is a good example of how complex foreign inheritance compliance can be. It’s not only about the assets that you inherit, it’s also (about) the assets you had before that. It’s understanding the history of the foreign inheritance; it’s understanding the relationship in the family. It’s being diligent and getting through all of the facts in the case: analyzing the primary documents, bank statements etcetera.

I’ve handled hundreds of voluntary disclosures and I can tell you that every one of these has it’s certain individual face: meaning it has its own characteristics which are unlike any other case. Now, some of the cases, of course can be very similar but there’s always something in that particular case that will differ this case from another.

In the next blog, I will continue talking about my experience with respect to doing voluntary disclosures for Asian Americans and Asians who became US tax residents.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.

Portland Oregon International Tax Attorney: FBAR Case Study for Indian Bank Accounts

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Hello and welcome to Sherayzen Video Blog. My name is Eugene Sherayzen and I’m an international tax attorney and owner of Sherayzen Law Office, Ltd.

Today, I’m continuing a series of blogs from Portland, Oregon. As part of this series, I’m doing a review of my cases related to Asian Americans or Asians who became US tax residents.

Today, I’d like to focus on India; on a case which is overall pretty ordinary except in one aspect: the number of accounts. In this case, a married couple from India (they’ve lived in the United States for a number of years, but they were still here on the H-1 Visa) and they came to me because they discovered the existence of FBAR. What in particular they discovered was is that foreign bank accounts need to be reported on FBAR. In their minds, a bank account really means a bank account, meaning a checking account or a savings account.

When they came to me, they told me that they had 15 bank accounts overall and it is very common in India to spread out your holdings over various banks. They had 15 accounts in four different banks. However, it turns out that instead of having 15 savings or checking accounts, the clients had also over 150 fixed-deposit accounts. In their mind, a fixed-deposit account was not a separate account; it is an account linked to a checking account or savings account.

However, when we talk about FBAR, we have to report all bank accounts separately; whether they are fixed-deposit accounts, checking accounts or savings accounts. We have to report each of them, no matter how short-lived they are – meaning if they were opened and closed even for one day, that would be enough to make it a reportable account for FBAR purposes. It also does not matter whether the funds from these accounts go back to the same checking account or savings account; all of these accounts are reportable. On top of that, this client also had about 10 mutual funds and about 7 (if my memory serves me well) life insurance policies.

I’ll talk a little later in another blog about Indian mutual funds and how they should be reported. This case is very important to understand that fixed-deposit accounts have to be separately reflected on FBARs.

It’s also important to understand that often times, you have to do your independent investigation of your client assets. A diligent attorney should always do an independent investigation of his clients’ assets; not to the point of intruding into clients’ affairs but asking the client if he sees something in the bank accounts that does not correspond with reality. The way I discovered there were fixed-deposit accounts was simply looking at the bank statements. It’s very important to look at the primary documents in order to understand how many accounts you have and what kind of reporting should be expected on FBAR and Form 8938.

In the next blog, I will continue my series of blogs related to Asians who became US tax residents and Asian Americans.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.

FBAR Reporting for Chinese Foreign Bank Accounts: A Case Study | FBAR Tax Lawyers Portland Oregon

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Good morning and welcome to Sherayzen Video Blog. My name is Eugene Sherayzen and I’m an international tax attorney and owner of Sherayzen Law Office, Ltd.

Today, I’m continuing a series of blogs from Portland, Oregon. As part of this series, I’m doing a review of my cases related to Asian Americans or Asians who became US tax residents.

Today, I’d like to talk to you about a small but interesting case related to FBAR reporting. A Chinese couple has lived in the United States for over 20 years and discovered the existence of FBAR. My clients understood that FBAR requires the disclosure of foreign bank accounts.

They came to me and said: “We have four bank accounts” and I said, “Fine, we’ll do a voluntary disclosure“. They gave me the amounts, they gave me the information and as I was going through the bank accounts, I discovered that there were a lot of deposits and withdrawals; a pattern compatible with that of fixed-deposit accounts. At that point, I asked them: “Besides the four bank accounts you’ve given me, do you have any other accounts which would be fixed-deposit accounts?” At this point, he said: “I didn’t realize that fixed-deposit accounts are treated as separate accounts because all of the money eventually goes back to the main account. Wouldn’t we be double-counting the values on these accounts if we were to include all of them separately on the FBAR?”

My answer was: “Indeed, we would be double-counting but FBAR not only permits but requires that kind of double-counting. You have to report the highest balance of each foreign account on the FBAR“. It turns out that he had over 20 fixed-deposit accounts during a six-year period that is covered by the SDOP disclosure.

We successfully completed the voluntary disclosure; The client paid the penalty. Of course the penalty for SDOP purposes does not double-count the balances because it is based not on the highest balances but on the end-of-year balances.

The morale of the story is that you have to report each account separately; even if this is just an account that was opened and closed in the same year and even if the money came from and went back to the same savings account or checking account.

In my next blog, I will continue discussing issues related to my cases that I’ve handled in the past concerning Asian Americans or Asians who became US tax residents.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.