FBAR for Immigrants: Reporting the Accounts You Left Back Home

If you moved to the United States for work, there is a good chance you still have a bank account in the country you moved from. There is an equally good chance nobody has ever asked you about it.

The Account Nobody Told You About

You took the offer, packed what fit, and left. The account your salary used to land in stayed open, because closing it was more effort than leaving it. There may be a second one your parents opened for you as a student, and a fixed deposit that quietly rolls over every year without anyone touching it.

You have not thought about any of it in a long time. Then a colleague mentions FBAR at lunch, or a new preparer asks a question your last three never asked, and the evening disappears into search results that all sound like warnings.

So the important part first. Holding money outside the United States is legal. It is ordinary, and millions of people who live and work here do it. Nothing about the account itself is a problem. What the U.S. asks for is disclosure, not permission — a form saying the account exists and how much was in it. The difficulty is almost never the money. It is a form nobody told you to file.

Who Has to File

The obligation attaches to U.S. persons, and that phrase is wider than most people assume. It covers:

U.S. citizens, including naturalized citizens
Lawful permanent residents — green card holders
Anyone who is a resident for tax purposes under the substantial presence test

That third line is where the misunderstanding lives, so it is worth stating without hedging: if you are here on an H-1B, an L-1, or an O-1 and you meet the substantial presence test, you are a U.S. person for this purpose. Your visa status is temporary; your tax residency is not conditional on it. People reason that because they are neither citizens nor green card holders, foreign account reporting must be somebody else's problem. It is not, and this is the most common misunderstanding we see.

The filing is triggered when the combined value of your foreign financial accounts crosses the reporting threshold at any point during the calendar year. That threshold is a fixed dollar figure, it is low, and it has not been adjusted in decades — each year's inflation quietly pulls more people over it. A single mid-sized account will clear it. So will three small ones.

What Counts as an Account

Wider than "bank account," again:

Checking and savings accounts
Fixed deposits, term deposits, and recurring deposit schemes
Brokerage and securities accounts
Pooled investment and mutual fund accounts held at a foreign institution
Some pension and provident fund arrangements, including employer schemes from the job you held before you moved
Some insurance products, where the policy has a cash surrender value

Two mechanics cause more errors than everything else combined.

The test is aggregate. You do not measure each account against the threshold on its own; you add them all together and compare the total, and the total has to exceed the threshold rather than merely reach it. Four accounts holding a quarter of the threshold each land you exactly on the line and not over it. Five do.

The test is the highest balance, not the year-end balance. This one catches careful people. Money that merely passed through counts at its peak — the proceeds of a flat you sold, an inheritance that sat for six weeks before being wired. An account holding a large sum in March and almost nothing on 31 December still counts at the March figure. Checking a year-end statement, seeing a small number, and concluding there is nothing to report is a reasonable thing to do, and it is wrong.

Accounts You Do Not Think of as Yours

The most commonly missed accounts are ones you would never describe as yours.

Signature authority. If you can direct what happens to the money — you are on the mandate for a parent's account, a family business account, or an employer's account back home — that can be reportable even though none of the balance is yours.
Joint accounts. Parents frequently add an adult child to an account for convenience, or with succession in mind. From the U.S. side, you are a joint holder of the whole balance, not a fraction of it.
Accounts opened in your name before you emigrated. A student account, a savings scheme a grandparent started for you, the dormant account that received your first salary. Yours on paper, forgotten in practice, reportable regardless.

The rule is built around control and access rather than beneficial ownership. "It is not really my money" can be entirely true and still not remove the obligation.

FBAR Is Not Form 8938

Two separate requirements covering much the same accounts, and constantly conflated.

Where it goes. The FBAR goes to FinCEN, through the BSA e-filing system, entirely separately from your tax return. Form 8938 goes to the IRS, attached to the return itself.
What triggers it. The FBAR has one low fixed threshold. Form 8938's thresholds are higher and vary by filing status and by whether you live in the U.S.
What it covers. The FBAR covers foreign financial accounts. Form 8938 covers those plus certain other foreign assets.

Different agency, different threshold, different definition of what is reportable. Form 8938 also reaches assets that are not accounts at all, such as foreign stock held outside an institution. Satisfying one does not satisfy the other. Depending on your balances you may owe both, one, or neither — and the common failure is filing whichever one a preparer happened to mention and assuming the matter is closed.

Deadlines

The FBAR is due at the same time as your federal income tax return, and it carries an automatic extension to October — automatic in the literal sense: no form, no request, nothing to elect. Miss the April date and you have not missed the deadline. That said, an extension that runs out unnoticed is the same as no extension at all.

If You Are Already Behind

Most people who discover this obligation discover it late. That is the ordinary case.

The IRS maintains the Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures for taxpayers whose failure to file was not willful. Non-willfulness means what it sounds like: negligence, a genuine misunderstanding, or simply never having been told. Nobody explains foreign account reporting at a visa appointment or in onboarding paperwork. Not knowing is the ordinary reason for not filing, and the procedures were built with that in mind.

The procedures come in two versions, and the difference matters for most people reading this. The domestic version — the one that applies if you live and work in the United States, which is nearly everyone here — carries a miscellaneous offshore penalty, charged once on the highest aggregate year-end value of the foreign assets that should have been reported. The version for taxpayers living abroad does not carry that penalty. So for nearly everyone reading this, catching up is not free, and it is worth knowing what it will cost you before you start. It is also a small fraction of what the ordinary penalty regime can produce for the same accounts, which is the entire reason the procedures exist.

What matters far more than how long you have been behind is who raises it first. Voluntary correction and after-the-fact discovery are treated very differently, and these procedures are generally only open to people who reach them before the IRS raises the issue. Foreign banks report U.S. account holders under intergovernmental agreements, so the information does arrive eventually, and closing the account does not erase the years it was open.

Which is the real risk here, and it is worth naming plainly. It is not the account. It is not the balance. It is waiting.

If you want an unhurried look at what you hold and what actually needs reporting, that is what our foreign asset reporting work is.