Description
Audience: Financial advisors, CPAs and EAs, estate attorneys, trust officers and private bankers
Language: English
Date: 21 Aug 2026
Time: 2:00 pm ET
All advice given to a cross-border client — how income is taxed, what must be reported, what the Internal Revenue Service can reach at death — depends on the client’s status determination usually made at intake, frequently with the wrong test. The United States runs two entirely separate status tests: a mechanical one for income tax and a facts-and-circumstances one for estate and gift tax. They disagree far more often than advisors expect, and the cost of the disagreement is measured in millions.
Learning objectives
- Apply the green card test and the substantial presence test to determine U.S. income tax residence, including the weighted day-count formula, the excluded-day categories, and the residency starting and ending dates.
- Distinguish income tax residence from estate and gift tax domicile, and identify the facts and circumstances that establish or defeat domiciliary intent.
- Evaluate the closer-connection exception, the exempt-individual categories, and the treaty tie-breaker sequence, and determine which relief is available to a given client.
- Recognise dual-status years, the first-year election under section 7701(b)(4), and the section 6013(g) and 6013(h) elections for a non-citizen spouse, together with their reporting consequences.
- Document the residence and domicile conclusion in the client file to a standard that will survive examination.
Some of the examples we will work through:
- A German executive on an L-1 visa, four years in the United States, owning a house in Munich and one in Boston, dies unexpectedly. Resident for income tax; domicile contested. The difference between the two answers is a USD 15 million exclusion against USD 60,000.
- A Swiss retiree who spends 130 days a year in Florida for eleven consecutive years. She passes substantial presence, needs Form 8840 every single year, and filed it in only eight of them.
- A French postdoctoral researcher in year six of J-1 status. Exempt-individual treatment expired at the end of year two, and no one recalculated.
Some of the questions we will answer:
- Does an expired green card, or one the client simply stopped using, end U.S. residence?
- Does a treaty tie-breaker under an income tax treaty also break the tie for estate tax purposes?
- Does filing Form 8833 invite examination?
- The client has filed as a nonresident for six years and is not one. What now?
Participant handouts
- A two-page residence and domicile decision tree
- A substantial-presence worksheet
- A cross-border intake questionnaire
