Green Card Holders Can’t Escape FBAR
If you are a Green card holder, you must be a bit more cautious than US citizens when traveling overseas. Not only must you protect your citizenship status, but if you have foreign bank accounts that exceed the filing threshold, you’ll be responsible for filing FBAR, too. David McKeegan provides more details in this brief video!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everybody. My name is David McKeegan. I’m with Greenback Expat Tax Services. Our question this week is, when a green card holder leaves the US temporarily, is the green card holder subject to FBAR reporting requirements? The short answer is yes. If you’re a green card holder and you have foreign bank accounts that have over $10,000 in them, you need to be reporting these accounts each year using the FBAR or Fincen Form 114, which is the formal name for the FBAR. This needs to be submitted electronically through the BSA filing system, and the deadline for that is June 30th each year. If a green card holder leaves the United States to move abroad for a period of time, the same rules apply. As long as you’re considered a US person, which is as long as you have that green card, you will need to continue filing the FBAR report each year. Same as any other US citizen living overseas.
I’m just going to make one quick note about green card holders going overseas. If you are a green card holder and you go overseas, you have to be very careful, because you could be viewed as having abandoned your green card. You definitely want to talk to somebody on the immigration side before you go overseas for any extended period of time. Especially if you plan on returning to the United States. You don’t want to risk having abandoned your green card and have to go through the whole process again of getting a new green card or anything like that. That’s all for this week. Thank you very much for listening. If you have any questions, please let us know.
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