Description
An adviser’s guide to the two federal regimes that reach foreign accounts held by estates, trusts and the persons who administer them: the separate machinery of the FBAR and Form 8938; which United States person files the FBAR, on the basis of legal title or of signature or other authority, and how the executor, the trustee and the officer of a corporate trustee acquire a personal filing duty for money that is not theirs, with the single regulatory relief for the trust beneficiary and the narrow reach of the officer and employee exceptions; the specified persons and specified assets of Form 8938, the domestic trust as a specified domestic entity and the reason a domestic estate never files; the succession laws of the twelve countries in which most of the firm’s matters arise, in three models: universal succession in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, title in the personal representative in England, Ireland and Canada, and the Austrian Verlassenschaft, with what each model means for the American heir and the American executor in the year of death; the income tax treaties, whose tie-breaker relieves Form 8938 but not the FBAR, and the intergovernmental agreements under which the partner country’s banks report the same accounts to the Internal Revenue Service; the non-willful and willful penalties after Bittner, their survival after death and the executor’s personal liability under the federal priority statute; the correction of past omissions under the procedures in force in 2026; the account inventory and the compliance calendar to be built before the first distribution; and a worked example of a Munich estate with accounts in Munich, Zurich and New York.
37 pages. Updated in September 2026.