Amending your FBAR Form 114

A Facebook post below is about amending the FBAR Form 114. Some readers did not understand why I posted it.

1. I write books for a living

2. One is titled How to Protect Your Life Savings from Hyperinflation & Depression, 2nd edition. http://www.johntreed.com/…/how-to-protect-your-life-savings…

3. A key piece of advice in that book is to put enough savings into foreign savings accounts or foreign cash in a Canadian safe deposit box to live off for 24 months. I have both and recommend both. The currencies I recommend and have are AUD, CAD, CHF, DKK, NZD, and SEK.

4. Foreign financial accounts must be reported annually to the IRS on Form 8938 with your tax return and on Form 114 to the Treasury Department with a June 30 deadline. There are severe penalties for not reporting on making a mistake on the report. No tax is due except on the interest as normal. You do not need to report foreign cash.

5. Many of my readers have followed my advice and opened the foreign accounts with bankers I put them in touch with.

6. This year, I made a mistake on the FBAR Form 114 I filed. It was more difficult than I expected to amend it, but not hard if you know how. So I told my readers in the Facebook post below the tricks: call the 866 number and don’t use Chrome browser.

I was forced to start using the Chrome browser by Shopify, my website store host. Treasury forced me back to Firefox for Form 114. You need multiple browsers these days for some reason.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Here is the original post:

My sharp-eyed Federal bank examiner wife spotted an error on my FBAR form. That’s the one you have to file with the Treasury annually for foreign financial accounts. I left one digit off the account number on an account in Canada. I could not get the FBAR web site to work. You have to file electronically.

So I called their 866-346-9478. A nice lady said you cannot use the Chome browser, which is what I was trying to do. Seems like they could have mentioned that on the website. But she was very helpful and we got it done fairly quickly.

Basically, you save the Form 114 into your computer when you file it. To amend, you need to enter your BSA Identifier number which they give you when you originally filed. You must unsign it, make the change, then resign it. You also have to check the box named “amended” on line 1.

It’s not a tax return, but there are severe penalties for not filing it or making an error in it. At one point it rejected my phone number because I put hyphens in it. I joked with the Treasury lady that I was going to end up in Leavenworth in a cell with a one-eyed guy who asks me what I’m in for. “Putting hyphens in my phone number. How about you?” “I misspelled ‘Street’ on the address of one of my foreign banks.”