FBAR Penalties and How to Fix Late FBARs

What an FBAR Is and Who Must File

FBAR stands for the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts. The report is filed online as FinCEN Form 114, separately from your tax return. You have to file one for any year in which you are a US person and the combined high point of all your foreign financial accounts went over $10,000 at any time during the year.

Three things trip people up. First, it is the aggregate that counts, not any single account. Two accounts holding $6,000 each add up to $12,000, so you report both, even though neither alone crosses the line. Second, it is the peak balance at any point in the year, not the year-end number, so an account you closed in March with $15,000 in it still has to be reported. Third, "US person" is broader than you think. The term covers US citizens, green-card holders living anywhere in the world, and US residents. A green-card holder who moves home to another country still files.

One narrow exception exists, and it is technical territory. A green-card holder who is treated as a resident of a treaty country, and Israel and Mexico both have income-tax treaties, may be able to claim non-US-person status under the treaty and step outside the FBAR. A federal court allowed exactly that for a Mexican green-card holder who had lived abroad for decades. The treaty route does not help US citizens, whose treaties preserve full US taxation, and for a long-term green-card holder the same move can itself trigger the expatriation exit tax. So it is worth knowing, but we screen it carefully before anyone relies on it.

Watch for the accounts people forget, such as foreign brokerage accounts, foreign mutual funds, cash-value foreign life insurance and annuity policies, and Israeli pension and savings arrangements (kupot gemel and keren hishtalmut). You also report an account you can sign on but do not own (a parent's account, an employer's account), even with no money of your own in it. Cryptocurrency on a foreign exchange has its own odd rule (crypto alone is currently outside the FBAR, but a mixed account comes in whole), covered in our crypto and FBAR guide. The form is due April 15, with an automatic extension to October 15; the FBAR deadline guide has the dates and the odd history behind them.

The FinCEN Rules Most People Miss

The FBAR rules live in FinCEN's regulations, not the tax code, and their edges catch people who think of themselves as having no foreign accounts at all. Five rules do most of the catching.

• A joint account is fully yours. If an account is held in more than one name, each US person on it reports the whole account at its full value, not a share of it. A couple with one Israeli account both report it, each at the full balance.
• You can own an account through an entity. Own more than half of a corporation, partnership, or any other entity, directly or indirectly, and the entity's foreign accounts count as yours. The same look-through reaches a trust you are treated as owning for US tax purposes, and a trust in which you hold more than half the beneficial interest. An anti-avoidance rule reaches entities created to dodge the report.
• Signing power alone is enough. Authority to move money in an account you do not own, by instruction to the bank, puts that account on your FBAR. The signature rule reaches the adult child added as a signer on an aging parent's foreign account, and the officer who can sign on an employer's account abroad. Certain employees of regulated companies get a carve-out for employer accounts, and FinCEN has repeatedly deferred the deadline for signature-authority-only filers by notice.
• US retirement plans are exempt; foreign pensions are not. An IRA or 401(k) that happens to hold foreign assets does not put an FBAR on you. A foreign retirement arrangement, an Israeli keren pensia or keren hishtalmut for example, gets no such pass and is analyzed under the ordinary ownership rules.
• 25 or more accounts, simplified filing. With a financial interest in 25 or more foreign accounts, you report the count and basic information rather than each account, with the details available if the government asks.

Two housekeeping rules round it out. FinCEN requires you to keep records for every reportable account (the name on the account, the account number, the bank's name and address, the account type, and the year's maximum value) for five years, and that recordkeeping duty stands on its own, separate from the filing duty. And in one of the odder details of this field, the regulation on the books still says the FBAR is due June 30. Congress moved the deadline to April 15 by statute in 2015, and FinCEN grants an automatic extension to October 15 with no request needed. The gap between the written rule and the operative deadline is a good miniature of this whole area. The current answers live in agency notices and practice, which is why the fine print gets checked before anything is filed.

The Penalties: What a Missed FBAR Costs

The size of an FBAR penalty turns on a single question. Was the failure willful? The two tracks are worlds apart.

• Non-willful, an innocent miss. The penalty is capped at $16,536 per year. After the Supreme Court's 2023 Bittner decision, that cap is per yearly form, not per account. So a person with ten unreported accounts over six years faces a maximum around $99,000 for the whole stretch, not a penalty multiplied by every account.
• Willful. The penalty is the greater of $165,353 or 50% of the highest account balance, applied per account, per year, across a six-year window. On a large account this compounds fast. A single account that peaked around half a million dollars can generate well over a million in willful penalties across six years.

The dollar figures above are normally adjusted for inflation each January, but the government cancelled the 2026 adjustment (the first skipped year in a decade), so the amounts above remain the current ones. A criminal track also exists for deliberate concealment, with potential fines and prison time, which is exactly what the voluntary disclosure path below is designed to head off. The willful versus non-willful line decides whether you are looking at a manageable number or a life-altering one, which is why we screen it first.

Is the Non-Willful FBAR Penalty $10,000 or $16,536?

The question I get most about this is, "Is the penalty $10,000 or $16,536?" Both numbers describe the same penalty at two dates. The statute Congress wrote says $10,000, and a 2015 federal law requires the Treasury to adjust that figure for inflation, so the regulation that carries the current amounts lists $16,536 for any non-willful penalty assessed on or after January 17, 2025. The willful floor moved the same way, from $100,000 in the statute to $165,353 in the regulation. The government skipped the 2026 adjustment, so the 2025 figures are the ones an examiner uses this year. A notice or an article that shows $10,000 is quoting the statute, one that shows $16,536 is quoting the table, and the table is the number that gets assessed. After the Supreme Court's 2023 decision, that figure applies once per late yearly form, whatever the number of accounts on it.

Willful vs. Non-Willful: The Line That Decides Everything

"Willful" does not only mean you set out to hide the account. Courts treat willful as covering three things, meaning knowing you had to file and choosing not to, recklessly disregarding the duty, and willful blindness (deliberately not looking when you had every reason to). In Florida, the federal appeals court that governs has held that recklessness is enough, and courts around the country put the burden on the government at the lower "more likely than not" standard, not the criminal one. The full walkthrough of the standard and the cases that built it is in our willful vs non-willful guide.

The single most damaging fact is the foreign-account question on Schedule B of your tax return. Checking "no" while you knew the account existed is the fact pattern in nearly every case the government wins. Other red flags include never telling your accountant about the account, instructing a bank to hold your mail, or moving money to dodge reporting.

On the other side, genuine non-willfulness usually looks like this. You inherited the account and never touched it, you moved to the US with accounts you did not know to report, you reported the foreign income but did not know the separate form existed, or your advisor was told about the accounts and gave you the wrong answer. Because the cleanup programs make you certify non-willfulness under penalty of perjury, signing that certification when the facts do not support it is the worst thing you can do. We make this call carefully, on your actual facts, before anything is filed.

The Case Files: What Courts Have Done to Real People

Everything above is doctrine. Here is what it looks like when it lands on a real person. Every one is a published decision in another party's case, not a client of this firm, and none of them predicts anything about yours. What they show is how the line between willful and non-willful gets drawn in practice, and what each side of it costs.

• The Tampa businessman with the numbered account. He moved about $1.1 million into a numbered Swiss account, paid the bank a fee to hold his mail, and answered "no" to the foreign-account question year after year. The federal appeals court covering Florida affirmed a willful penalty against him on summary judgment, meaning no trial was even needed. United States v. Rum (11th Cir. 2021).
• The $12 million inheritance. A naturalized citizen inherited money from his father and kept it in Swiss accounts. After a bench trial found him willful, three appeals, and a constitutional ruling in his favor that trimmed exactly $300,000, the judgment still stood at $12,255,813. The court fight over collecting it has since produced repatriation orders, a contempt finding, and an arrest warrant. The full story is in our case study, the $12 million Swiss inheritance.
• The account in the dog's name. A man held his Swiss account under his dog's name, paid for hold-mail service, and hid the money from his wife and a judgment creditor. He thought he had settled with the IRS for about $419,000, signed the agreement, and paid. The IRS then walked away from the deal because the agent who signed it lacked authority, assessed $2.29 million, and the appeals court let that stand. The full story is told in the account in the dog's name.
• The jury verdict worth more than the account. A Miami man's case went all the way to a jury, which found him willful for three years. The penalties upheld came to $2,241,809 against an account that peaked at $1,691,054, and the case settled for about $1.76 million while a constitutional challenge was still pending. United States v. Zwerner (S.D. Fla. 2014).
• The penalty that outlived the man. The government sued over a willful penalty after the account holder died, and a Florida federal court let the claim proceed against his son, who had received the estate's assets. The exposure passed with the money. United States v. Estate of Schoenfeld (M.D. Fla. 2018), covered in our statute of limitations guide.
• The Supreme Court's one mercy. The government read one man's five late forms as 272 violations and demanded $2.72 million; the Supreme Court held the non-willful penalty applies per form, cutting the exposure to $50,000. Bittner v. United States (2023). The willful side got no such relief. A $2.17 million willful penalty against a woman in her 80s stood, and the Court declined to hear her case over a written dissent. United States v. Toth (1st Cir. 2022).

The pattern across the whole docket is consistent. Concealment facts decide willfulness, willfulness decides the number, and the number dwarfs what a timely fix would have cost. The case-by-case tour of the willfulness fights is in our willful vs non-willful guide.

How to Fix Late FBARs: The Four Programs

If you are behind, there is almost always a path scaled to your situation. The fix depends on three things, namely whether you lived abroad, whether you reported the foreign income, and whether the IRS has already contacted you. Here are the four named paths.

• Streamlined Foreign Offshore (SFOP). SFOP is for a non-willful person who lived outside the US for at least one of the relevant years. The penalty is zero. SFOP is the only program that lets a never-filer submit original returns, and it is the common fix for olim and Americans abroad.
• Streamlined Domestic Offshore (SDOP). SDOP is for a non-willful US resident who filed returns but missed the foreign reporting. The penalty is 5% of the highest aggregate year-end balance across all your reportable accounts in the covered years.
• Delinquent information return procedure (DIIRSP). DIIRSP is the route for missed forms like 3520 or 5471 where the income was reported, and the procedure runs on a reasonable-cause explanation.
• Voluntary Disclosure Practice (VDP). VDP is for willful cases, and it is the track we handle in-house, start to finish. The program carries real penalties but is the path to near-certain protection from criminal prosecution, and it is the only program that ends in a binding closing agreement. The application (Form 14457) got easier in 2025, when the IRS removed the much-criticized checkbox that forced applicants to admit willfulness before ever speaking to the government. The full walkthrough is in our IRS Voluntary Disclosure guide.

Until July 2026 a fifth named program existed. The Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures let a person who reported all the foreign income and only missed the form file the late FBARs with an explanation and no penalty. On July 1, 2026, the IRS removed that program's page from its website with no announcement, and its list of compliance options now shows only the programs above. The internal examiner guidance that says a qualifying non-willful filer should not be penalized still exists, and late FBARs can still be filed through FinCEN's e-filing system with an explanation, so the practical route survives. Our delinquent FBAR guide walks through who still qualifies and how the filing works now. But the written program promise is gone, and that is the real cost of waiting. IRS programs can and do vanish without warning.

Choosing wrong is expensive in both directions. Putting a willful person into a streamlined program means signing a false certification, and over-routing a genuinely innocent person into voluntary disclosure can cost far more than they ever needed to pay. The willfulness screen therefore comes before the program choice. For the step-by-step eligibility walkthrough and the forms each path needs, see our guide to the streamlined filing compliance procedures. And because the FBAR has a sibling reporting form, our Form 8938 vs FBAR guide shows when you file one, the other, or both.

The One Move to Avoid: Quiet Disclosure

The most common instinct is also the most dangerous one. "Can't I just file the back forms myself and move on?" That approach, filing delinquent FBARs or amended returns outside any formal program and without a disclosure statement, is called a quiet disclosure, and the answer is a firm no.

Three reasons. First, detection is likely anyway (more on that below), and a quiet filing that lands after the IRS already has your account data simply confirms the earlier non-compliance without claiming any program protection. Second, the IRS treats a quiet disclosure as an attempt to slip past the formal programs, and the amended filing can become evidence that you knew about the duty, which can push a non-willful situation toward willful. Third, it can forfeit your eligibility for the streamlined and voluntary-disclosure programs entirely. The counterintuitive reality is that most people who are tempted by a quiet disclosure actually qualify for an amnesty program that costs little or nothing and gives them real protection. Call before you file anything.

Why Waiting Is Risky: FATCA and Detection

The reason "wait and see" rarely works anymore is a law called FATCA. Under it, more than 100 countries and hundreds of thousands of foreign banks now report US account holders to the IRS every year. Israeli banks, kupot, and insurers report. Switzerland becomes a reporting jurisdiction in 2028. The IRS receives all of that and cross-matches it against the foreign-account question on your return, so a "no" while a bank has already reported the account is an automatic flag.

For Israeli accounts this is not a theoretical risk; the enforcement history is direct. Bank Leumi paid $400 million in penalties in 2014 (including $270 million to the Justice Department) and turned over the names of more than 1,500 US account holders. Mizrahi-Tefahot paid $195 million in 2019. And Bank Hapoalim paid about $874 million in 2020 after admitting it helped US taxpayers hide more than $7.6 billion across more than 5,500 accounts. Every one of those resolutions sent account-holder information to the IRS as part of the deal.

Timing matters because the programs that protect you are only open until the IRS contacts you about the accounts. Streamlined disappears the moment they reach out; voluntary disclosure disappears the moment they already have your information from a third party. Coming forward first is what keeps the cheaper, safer options on the table. Waiting hands that choice to the IRS.

Inherited Accounts and the Florida Estate

FBAR problems often surface during an estate, which is where this work meets our Florida practice. Three things happen when foreign accounts pass at death. First, the year you inherit a foreign account, your own FBAR clock starts (if your foreign accounts cross $10,000), and the parent's old non-compliance does not transfer to you. Second, if you received more than $100,000 in the year from a foreign person, a separate form (Form 3520) is due, with its own penalties.

Third comes the one estate attorneys miss. A decedent who held foreign accounts and never filed FBARs leaves an exposure that survives death and binds the estate, and a Florida federal court has enforced that very exposure. The IRS can even pursue beneficiaries who already received distributions. So on any estate with foreign accounts, the FBAR history should be checked and addressed before assets go out the door. We build this into the estate administration when it comes up. See our foreign account reporting guide for how every foreign asset maps to its form, or the international and cross-border overview →

How We Work, and What We Refer Out

Offshore cleanup ranges from a simple late filing to a willful disclosure with criminal stakes, so we are honest about where our role sits. The legal work is handled here, meaning the screening that tells you whether the miss was willful, the Voluntary Disclosure Practice from preclearance through the closing agreement, the reasonable-cause and penalty-defense work, and the estate side, all under attorney-client privilege. Privilege is the reason the willfulness conversation belongs with a lawyer first. What you tell an accountant is not protected if the matter ever turns criminal, and what you tell us is.

The accounting work goes to people who do it every day. A streamlined submission is three years of returns and six years of FBARs, which is return preparation, so once the screen says that route is safe we refer it to an international tax preparer and stay available for the legal questions the certification raises. Most of this is done by phone and video, which fits clients who are out of state or out of the country, including the many Americans living in Israel. The first and most valuable step is the screen, because it decides everything that follows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The oleh with old Israeli accounts. An American who made aliyah years ago discovers eight years of unfiled FBARs on ordinary Israeli bank, pension, and savings accounts. He always reported what little income there was and simply never knew the form existed. Because the failure was innocent and he lived abroad, the Streamlined Foreign Offshore path clears it with no penalty, and a quiet disclosure would have made it worse.

The new green-card holder. A professional who moved to Florida kept her brokerage account back home and assumed it was none of the IRS's business. She reported all her US income honestly. With the income picture clean and the miss non-willful, the Streamlined Domestic path resolves it for 5% of her highest aggregate year-end balance, and she is current going forward.

The estate with a surprise account. While settling a parent's Florida estate, the family finds a foreign account the parent never reported. Before any distribution, the personal representative addresses the estate's FBAR exposure, the heir is counseled on the Form 3520 for the large foreign inheritance and on her own new FBAR duty, and the distribution goes out cleanly.

Sources of Law

• FBAR authority and reporting duty: 31 U.S.C. §5314; 31 C.F.R. §1010.350 (who files, $10,000 aggregate threshold, reportable accounts, signature authority); FinCEN Form 114. bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov
• Civil penalties: 31 U.S.C. §5321(a)(5) (non-willful §5321(a)(5)(B); willful §5321(a)(5)(C) to (D)); inflation-adjusted maximums (non-willful $16,536, willful floor $165,353) for assessments on or after January 17, 2025, 31 C.F.R. §1010.821. Per-form non-willful rule: Bittner v. United States, 598 U.S. 85 (2023).
• FinCEN rules detail: 31 C.F.R. §1010.350(e) (financial interest, including the joint-account rule at (e)(1), the greater-than-50% entity rules at (e)(2)(ii), the trust rules at (e)(2)(iii) to (iv), and the anti-avoidance rule at (e)(3)); §1010.350(f) (signature or other authority and the officer and employee exceptions); §1010.350(g)(1) to (2) (25 or more accounts), (g)(4) (US retirement plans and IRAs); §1010.420 (5-year recordkeeping). Due date: 31 C.F.R. §1010.306(c) (the unamended June 30 text) as superseded by Pub. L. 114-41, §2006(b)(11) (April 15) with FinCEN's automatic extension to October 15; signature-authority-only filers extended to April 15, 2027 by FinCEN Notice FIN-2025-NTC3 (Dec. 8, 2025). (retrieved 2026-08-18)
• Willfulness standard (recklessness and willful blindness): United States v. Said Rum, 995 F.3d 882 (11th Cir. 2021) (controlling in Florida); Safeco Ins. Co. v. Burr, 551 U.S. 47 (2007); Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB, 563 U.S. 754 (2011).
• Case files: United States v. Schwarzbaum, 24 F.4th 1355 (11th Cir. 2022) and 127 F.4th 259 (11th Cir. 2025) (Excessive Fines Clause applies; three $100,000 minimum penalties vacated; final judgment $12,255,813); United States v. Niksich, No. 24-12882 (11th Cir. June 4, 2026) (no reporter citation yet; Eighth Amendment question remanded); United States v. Zwerner, No. 1:13-cv-22082 (S.D. Fla. 2014) (jury verdict; settled); United States v. Toth, 33 F.4th 1 (1st Cir. 2022), cert. denied, 143 S. Ct. 552 (2023) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting from denial); United States v. Garrity, No. 3:15-cv-243 (D. Conn. Apr. 3, 2018) (order before trial on the estate's fiduciaries: preponderance standard, recklessness suffices; penalty balance $1,061,181.09 when suit was filed in 2015 for the 2005 account year; only that order was read, and the trial result is not described here). Decisions in other parties' cases; no citator service run; verified against the opinions as retrieved 2026-08-18.
• Statute of limitations: 6 years to assess, 31 U.S.C. §5321(b)(1); 2 years to sue, §5321(b)(2). Criminal: 31 U.S.C. §5322.
• Companion reporting: Form 8938 / FATCA, 26 U.S.C. §6038D; foreign gifts and trusts, Form 3520, 26 U.S.C. §§6048, 6039F. Estate exposure survives death: United States v. Estate of Schoenfeld, 344 F. Supp. 3d 1354 (M.D. Fla. 2018). (retrieved 2026-07-11)
• Treaty residence and the FBAR: 31 C.F.R. §1010.350(b) (a US person includes a resident alien under 26 U.S.C. §7701(b)); §7701(b)(6) (a green-card holder ceases resident status by treaty); Aroeste v. United States, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 208582 (S.D. Cal. Nov. 20, 2023) (a treaty-resident green-card holder was not a US person for the FBAR; one district court, as applied). US-Israel Income Tax Treaty (1975), Art. 3 (fiscal-residence tie-breaker) and Art. 6(3) (saving clause preserving US taxation of citizens). (retrieved 2026-07-16)
• Israeli-bank enforcement: US Dep't of Justice press releases, Bank Leumi deferred-prosecution agreement (Dec. 22, 2014; $270 million DOJ, $400 million total with NYDFS); Mizrahi-Tefahot deferred-prosecution agreement (Mar. 12, 2019; $195 million); Bank Hapoalim resolutions (Apr. 30, 2020; about $874 million total).
• Compliance programs: IRS, Options Available for U.S. Taxpayers with Undisclosed Foreign Financial Assets (as updated June 30, 2026, listing the Voluntary Disclosure Practice, the streamlined procedures, and the delinquent information return procedures; the standalone Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures page was removed from irs.gov on July 1, 2026). Examiner no-penalty guidance for qualifying non-willful filers: IRM 4.26.16.3.11 (June 24, 2021). 2026 penalty-inflation adjustment cancelled: OMB guidance of April 17, 2026; the January 17, 2025 amounts (90 Fed. Reg. 5629) remain current. (retrieved 2026-07-24)

What the FBAR Cases Cost the Families in Them

I have watched families spend more on litigating a penalty than the disclosure would have cost to do correctly. The FBAR docket is where that shows most plainly, because the penalty is set by a formula and the fight is only ever about whether the formula applies, which means the money spent fighting it buys nothing but time.

The case I would show a family first is a Connecticut order from April 2018 that I read in full. A man held a foreign bank account in 2005 and did not report it. He died in 2008. In February 2015, seven years after his death and ten years after the account year, the government sued the three people serving as fiduciaries of his estate, two of them carrying his surname, to collect a willful penalty that stood at $1,061,181.09 on the day the complaint was filed. The family's lawyers did the arithmetic on what the same conduct would have cost under the tax code and put it in their brief, at least $936,691 for the willful FBAR penalty against $621 had the government sued for civil tax fraud instead. They argued that a penalty of that size should have to be proved by clear and convincing evidence, and that willful should mean he knew the duty and broke it on purpose. The judge ruled against them on both points, two months before jury selection. The government had to prove its case only as more likely than not, and reckless conduct would satisfy the willfulness element. The government's own lawyers had predicted the opposite in a 2006 internal memo (the court set it aside as non-binding), so even the IRS once expected the higher standard.

My reading of that case is that the estate was arguing about the standard of proof because the facts had already been fixed, in 2005, by a man who could no longer explain them. A family in federal court thirteen years after the account year, defending a dead man's decision, is a family with no good move left, and the order I read is about which rules they would lose under. In reading these cases with the family in mind rather than the doctrine, I have a few take-home points.

The first is that the exposure follows the money and outlives the person. The penalty in that case was assessed for a single year, and it still exceeded a million dollars a decade later, against people who had not opened the account and could not answer for it. Every program that fixes an FBAR problem is written for a living filer who can sign a certification, so the fix belongs to the account holder while the account holder is alive. The practice pointer is that I ask about foreign accounts at the planning meeting, when a parent is signing a will, because the probate meeting is too late to use any of the four programs above.

Second, the burden of proof is lower than families expect, and reckless is enough. The government does not need a confession or a hidden ledger. A "no" on the foreign-account question, an accountant who was never told, and a bank told to hold the mail are enough to prove the case as more likely than not. The practice pointer is that the willfulness screen I run asks the questions a jury would be asked, in the same order, before anyone signs a certification, because the answers decide the program and the program decides the number.

Third, the family's own comparison, $936,691 against $621, is the clearest statement I have seen of what this penalty is. The FBAR penalty is not proportioned to the tax owed on the account, and it is not proportioned to the harm. The willful penalty is half the balance, per year, and the tax on the interest is beside the point. A disclosure during his lifetime would have been priced by a program instead of by that formula, 5% of the highest year-end balance under the streamlined domestic procedure if the miss was non-willful, or the voluntary-disclosure penalty if it was not, and either one ends in a signed agreement rather than a jury date for the family. The screen that tells a family which of those two applied is the work I do here, at a flat fee quoted at the consult, and the consult itself is free. Avoid leaving an unreported foreign account for an estate to sort out, because every program that could have fixed it needed the account holder's signature, and the estate is left with the formula and a courtroom.

The order I read decided the rules for the trial, and it does not say what the jury did in June 2018. I have not read the verdict, so I will not describe an ending I have not seen, and the point of the case does not depend on it. The point is the thirteen years, the seven-figure balance on a single account year, and the three people who inherited the fight instead of the money.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. Each case described above is a decision of a court rather than a matter handled by this firm. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Updated on September 3, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. This article is general information about US law, not legal or tax advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Offshore compliance is specialized; streamlined submissions and return preparation are referred to an international tax preparer, while the willfulness screen and voluntary disclosure are handled here. Penalty figures are inflation-adjusted each January and may change. Your result depends on your specific facts.