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The penalties imposed for failure to file a Foreign Bank Account Reporting form (FBAR) can be substantial. The IRS has many mechanisms to collect on those debts. If you have received a notice of collection efforts, can you request a collection due pr… Read More

They say that nothing is certain except death and taxes. A recent decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York says, between the two, taxes win. The judge granted the IRS authority to collect FBAR penalties from… Read More

Penalties for willful failure to file reports of foreign financial accounts – commonly called FBARs – are some of the highest civil penalties the government can impose. But until now, no court had been willing to say those fines were excessive. I… Read More

The Ninth Circuit – known as one of the most taxpayer friendly of the federal circuit courts – has joined many other courts in holding that reckless violations of the Bank Secrecy Act were sufficient to uphold willful FBAR penalties. The Court af… Read More

There have been a lot of cases in the last several years defining willfulness in the context of failures to file FBAR forms with the IRS. But a recent decision from the Northern District of California addresses the issue slightly differently. Instead… Read More

Small businesses, and even large ones, depend on their top employees to do everything from interfacing with customers to filing company tax returns. When a key employee has a serious physical or mental illness at tax time, it can create problems for… Read More

U.S. taxpayers with foreign business interests must disclose those interests to the IRS or face substantial penalties. But for the past year, the IRS’s foreign business assessment authority has been off-line. A 2023 Tax Court decision held that the… Read More

Imagine working as an employee for a company for two years and then having the IRS impose trust fund recovery penalties worth more than 10 times your annual salary. That’s exactly what happened in Powell v IRS, but when it came time for trial, the… Read More