If you are a US taxpayer with foreign financial accounts (such as a bank, brokerage, or potentially even a gold storage account overseas), there’s a fairly new disclosure form that you must file to the IRS today along with your 1040.
It’s called form 8938. And if you’ve never heard about it, I definitely recommend you speak to your tax advisor pronto.
Like all of these other tax forms, they threaten you with all sorts of fees, interest, penalties, and of course, jail time.
(The US is one of the only civilized countries in the world where taxation creates -criminal- liability. Again, totally incongruent.)
What’s interesting about this is that it’s possible there could be certain instances and certain places in the world where the local privacy laws could make it -illegal- to disclose this information to the IRS.
But the US government doesn’t care.
And on page 7 of the instructions for form 8938, they say that even if “a foreign jurisdiction would impose a civil or criminal penalty on you if you disclose the required information,” then they still expect you to file the form.
File the form and go to jail. Don’t file the form and go to jail.
Is this really what a ‘free society’ puts its citizens through?