Owning something abroad is not the problem. Not reporting it is.

1. Form 5471

   You own part of a foreign corporation

   A US person with an ownership interest in a foreign corporation generally has to report it every year — whether or not the company distributed anything, and whether or not it made money.

   The form carries the company's own financial statements translated into US tax concepts, which is why it is real work rather than a checkbox. How much of the schedule applies depends on how much you own and which category of filer that puts you in.

   The expensive version is the owner who has held the company for years, never heard of the form, and files the first one on its own with nothing said about the earlier years. See the last block on this page before doing that.

2. FBAR — FinCEN Form 114

   You have accounts outside the United States

   The FBAR is not part of your tax return and it does not go to the IRS. It is filed separately with FinCEN, and it reports the accounts themselves rather than the income from them.

   It is measured across all your accounts together, and it counts accounts you can merely sign on even when the money is not yours — a parent's account, a company account, a pension.

   Filing the return and skipping the FBAR, because the return was the part people knew about. They are two separate obligations with two separate penalties.

3. Form 8938

   The one that looks like the FBAR and is not

   Form 8938 reports foreign financial assets, and unlike the FBAR it does ride with your tax return. It overlaps heavily with the FBAR, uses different thresholds, and reaches things the FBAR does not — an interest in a foreign entity, certain contracts and holdings.

   Filing one does not satisfy the other. In most situations where one applies, both do.

   Treating them as the same form. Two filings, two sets of rules, and the overlap is exactly what makes it easy to file half of what was due and believe you are finished.

4. Form 1120-F and foreign-owned LLCs

   You are not American and you own something here

   A foreign corporation doing business in the United States, or earning certain kinds of US income, files its own US return.

   Separately — and this is the one that surprises people — a US LLC with a single foreign owner has a reporting obligation of its own even in a year it did nothing at all. The company was formed, it never traded, and the filing was still due.

   A dormant foreign-owned LLC nobody filed for. No income, no tax, and a penalty regardless.

5. US real estate and FIRPTA

   Selling US property as a foreign owner

   When a foreign person sells US real estate, the buyer is generally required to hold back part of the price and send it to the IRS. The return filed afterward is what reconciles that withholding against the tax actually owed.

   There are procedures to reduce the amount held back, and they have to be started before the closing rather than after it.

   Finding out about the withholding at the closing table. By then the money is gone for a year and the only route back is the return.

6. ITIN

   A US tax number when you cannot have a Social Security number

   An ITIN is the identification number for people who have a US filing obligation and are not eligible for a Social Security number — foreign owners, spouses and dependents, sellers of US property.

   The application is paperwork plus certified proof of identity, and it usually travels with the return it exists for. It is the kind of filing that gets rejected over a document rather than over the substance.

   Sending original passports, or copies certified by somebody not authorized to certify them. The rejection costs months and the deadline does not move to accommodate it.

7. Gifts, inheritances and foreign trusts

   Money that arrived from outside the country

   A gift or an inheritance from a foreign person is generally not taxable income to the person receiving it, and is generally reportable. Those two facts are not in conflict — people hear the first one and stop.

   Foreign trusts are their own regime, with separate forms for the US beneficiary and the US owner. They are one of the few areas here where the reporting genuinely is harder than the tax.

   “It was not taxable, so there was nothing to file.” Reporting and taxation are separate questions, and the penalty attaches to the reporting.

8. Coming into compliance

   What to do about the years already missed

   There are established routes for a taxpayer who should have been filing these and was not, and which route fits turns mostly on one thing: whether the failure was willful. That is a legal question with a factual answer, and it is the first thing to settle rather than the last.

   What matters most here is the order of operations. Filing a current-year form on its own, with nothing said about the years behind it, is the step that closes off the better options.

   Quietly filing this year and hoping the earlier ones go unnoticed. It forecloses the programs built for exactly this situation, and it is the most common thing people do before they call.

No limit, threshold, rate or penalty figure appears on this page, on purpose. Those move, and a stale number under an accounting firm's name is worse than no number at all — anything with a date on it lives in the Tax Center, with its source and the day we checked it. And where a question is genuinely a legal one rather than a tax one, such as whether a failure was willful or what a treaty says about your residency, we will say so and work alongside counsel rather than around them.