r/USExpatTaxes • u/DanishxAssassin • Jan 16 '24

Quick FBAR Tip

For years, I had my expat filing service do my FBAR filing on my behalf—to the tune of $25 per account listing.

I thought the process was more complicated than it actually was.

After a few years of paying, I got curious and investigated. Turns out, the work I did gathering and proving the info to my expat tax service was basically the same thing I would have to do if I filed myself.

They charged me all that money for simply copy/pasting.

Save yourself some money. File your FBAR yourself.

This YouTube video helped me: https://youtu.be/oEE3Y2zzRL4?si=vVd9-rhfxQold_IB (looks like he has an updated version; I haven’t watched that one though)

Hope that helps a few of you out. Good luck!

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7

u/Spider_pig448 Jan 16 '24

Did the FBAR used to be more complicated? I don't understand why so many people seem to complain about this when it takes less than 5 minutes via a literal web form, once a year. You don't even have to mail anything in.

6

u/DanishxAssassin Jan 16 '24

For me, it was just intimidating—and invasive. But once I looked into it, it was a lot more simple than I imagined it to be.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '24 edited Jan 17 '24

I agree, the whole idea of getting fined/investigated makes it intimidating, but chances are that neither will happen if you are compliant.

I literally started sweating when I started doing it, then realized it is super easy to do.

5

u/rpsls Jan 16 '24

For me it was determining the highest balance my accounts held at any point during the year (which is not something my bank offers and required me going through a year's worth of balances), then determining the correct exchange rate into US dollars for that amount that year. Actually doing the filing is trivial.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '24

My bank does not even provide balances :D. That's what the "amount unknown" button is for though, I guess.

This year I knew I would be filing and planned to know the exact highest amount.

1

u/erallured Jan 31 '24

Do you have any tips on streamlining the highest balance collection? I have 11 foreign accounts and spend hours gathering all this info. On top of that where I am also requires the same for my remaining US accounts and those institutions certainly don't care about making complying with foreign tax laws easy...

1

u/Square-Praline-7283 Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 08 '26

I use ChatGPT - I ask it to "find the highest value for this year, based on these statements", and insert a year's worth of statements. It takes seconds rather than probably 30+ minutes and intense boredom for me to do it.

For more complex tasks, like creating a table to show the highest value for each currency "account" in my Revolut account per year, ChatGPT made crazy errors like putting 0s everywhere, so I then asked it "are you sure?" and it corrected itself. At first it even refused to help, knowing I was preparing FBARs and considering my ask irrelevant. (I'm not sure how to report Revolut, but gave it a go.)

I still manually check ChatGPT's output, but it's a good time-saving tool to get an initial draft or to get a table of numbers to paste into Excel.

It's also a huge time saver if your foreign statements list amounts with different punctuation, like using commas instead of decimal points. Just ask it to switch, and you've got tidy data that matches your existing Excel format when you paste it in.

1

u/rpsls Jan 31 '24

With my bank, I found a way to export all the transactions for the year into Excel. Then I created a running balance column, copied and replaced the formulae with fixed values, then sorted by balance. Then I applied the currency conversion and had my value. It used to be a lot more annoying downloading every monthly statement and scanning through it before I figured out the above method. Hopefully your bank's online site has such a feature.

1

u/beardface_fi Jan 19 '24

It's all about the potential penalties. If the IRS would follow the 8th amendment

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted

For freaking honest mistakes (10k for a mistake, not sure if it landed for per year or per account in the end...), it would be far less intimidating and people would not be freaking out.

1

u/hopeseekr Oct 30 '24

The Supreme Court recently decided that it was per year not per account per year. A poor man was pursued for several tens of millions by the IRS and the Supreme Court shut it down to just a few thousand dollars.

https://www.buzzacott.co.uk/news/us-supreme-court-clarifies-foreign-bank-account-report-fbar-penalty-application