Foreign Inheritance & US International Tax Issues | Form 3520 Lawyer & Attorney Austin Texas

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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 my series of blogs from Austin, Texas. In this series of blogs, I’m talking about the US tax reporting requirements that concern immigrants who came to live and work in Austin.

Today, I would like to discuss a very important topic of foreign inheritance. Foreign inheritance, as I’ve said in one of my seminars, is a Pandora’s box of US tax reporting requirements because it’s not only about the reporting of foreign inheritance itself, but also the continuous reporting requirements that may stem from the original foreign inheritance. These reporting requirements may continue for many many years and can be very diverse; so let’s discuss first things first.

Is foreign inheritance taxable in the United States? The answer is usually ‘no’. Of course, US situs property inherited in the United States may be taxed in the United States and the reporting and taxation requirements, will apply to the foreign estate, not to the person who inherited the asset.

The second question is: Is foreign inheritance reportable in the United States? The answer to this question is absolutely, yes. It is highly important that you disclose your foreign inheritance in a timely manner here in the United States. Failure to do so on form 3520, may lead to the imposition of absolutely humongous penalties, up to 25% of the foreign inheritance. I have seen personally, where the IRS imposed penalties like these and I had to fight them.

The other aspect that I mentioned, are the reporting requirements that are associated with foreign inheritance, because usually people inherit assets. That means foreign assets; that means sometimes foreign financial accounts. It may mean foreign businesses; it may mean a foreign trust or beneficiary interest. It may mean other foreign financial assets likely bonds or bond certificates; it also may mean real estate. These foreign assets, which were inherited, may have and usually do have special reporting requirements associated with each of these assets and sometimes, even if they don’t, aside from the Form 3520 reporting of inherited real estate, there may not be any other reporting requirements for the real estate because personally, there may be income tax reporting requirements that are tied to your Form 3520 compliance and may reappear all of a sudden 10, 15, 20 years later.

In some cases, a foreign inheritance may be tied to an IRS audit and there, it could be very significant. For example, I’ve had audits where we had to go back to the 1980s with respect to foreign inheritance and establishing the fair market value of those assets.

Foreign inheritance is not just one reporting requirement; it’s a whole family of reporting requirements that may come in sometimes at the time of a foreign inheritance as well as after the foreign inheritance.

If you would like to learn more about your foreign inheritance reporting requirements, you can contact me at [email protected] or call me at (952) 500-8159.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.

Taiwanese Bank Accounts & Corporation Voluntary Disclosure Case | FBAR 5471 International Tax Lawyer

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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’d like to talk to you about a case that I completed about a year and a half ago with respect to a Taiwanese corporation. The case initially, came to me as a couple, an American who married a Tawainese woman, who have lived in the United States for awhile and she eventually became a permanent resident of the United States (still not a Citizen of the United States) and she had foreign bank accounts about which she had no idea because she gave her mother the Power of Attorney to open up bank accounts in her name.

This is very common in Southeast Asia where parents take liberties with their children’s finances and often times, they would open up bank accounts without their knowledge. Eventually on one of the trips to Taiwan, she found out from her mother that there were bank accounts that she needed to account for. She started researching what she needed to do with respect to those accounts in the United States and eventually found out about FBAR and the foreign income reporting, Form 8938 reporting, etc. etc. After that, she came to me to fix the problem.

While we were doing this voluntary disclosure, we discovered through a series of indirect hints that something else was going on there. Eventually, it turned out that her father assigned 50% of a Taiwanese corporation to her, also without her knowledge. Now in addition to FBAR, Form 8938 and foreign income reporting, and actually also PFIC reporting; she also needed to file a Form 5471 and she also needed to account for her Taiwanese corporation on Form 8938 because she is a minority owner; it’s not a controlled foreign corporation, so the Form 5471 was not required in some of the years; it was only required in the first year.

Eventually we completed the voluntary disclosure and it went through just fine but this is an important lesson to learn, that in a voluntary disclosure, you never know what kind of surprises may come in, even something as unexpected as ownership of a foreign company.

In the next blog, I will continue review of a series of cases that I’ve done for Asian Americans and Asians who became US Tax Residents.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.

Austin TX: The Hotbed of US International Tax Compliance | FBAR & FATCA Austin Texas

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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 in Austin, Texas. In fact, I’m on the famous 6th Street and you can see behind me that there’s the old Driskill Hotel built in 1886.

Since I’m starting out this series of blogs from Austin, I want to say why I came to this city besides meeting with a client here and conducting a consultation here; I came here because I wanted to get to know this great city and as a huge source of clients for my firm. Now, Austin is truly prolific when it comes to clients for my firm. In fact, I would say that it is in the top five cities in the United States. Sometimes, I get more clients from Austin that I get from New York and Boston combined. Why is that? Well, the answer is very simple: there are a lot of immigrants here in Austin that come here from all over the world. They come here from Germany, from Switzerland, from Australia and New Zealand, England, Brazil, Mexico, etc. When these immigrants come to Austin, they usually do not come empty-handed. They still maintain ties to their home countries; they still have assets there, they may be the beneficiary of a foreign trust in New Zealand and they may have received an inheritance in the United Kingdom, they may be running businesses in Mexico. Wherever it is that they have, has US tax reporting consequences here in the United States. Unfortunately, many of them are not aware of these consequences and do not understand them. This is why many of them tend to be non-compliant with US tax reporting requirements and later they will come to me to help them fix it.

In future blogs, I will continue talking about US tax reporting requirements that apply to these immigrants that come to Austin, Texas.

Thank you for watching, until the next time.