Trevor Nakamura
🇺🇸US expatriate tax, foreign accounts and double taxation
I am a CPA in Chicago and for fifteen years I have worked with Americans living abroad and foreign nationals with US-source income. The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income no matter where they live, and every year that produces situations nobody saw coming. The recurring ones: returns years behind and how to catch up without penalties, foreign bank accounts that should have been reported, the foreign tax credit, and the treatment of French assurance-vie and PEA accounts - both of which the IRS handles in ways that are punishing if you did not plan for them. I also see a lot of French nationals who worked in the States and do not know what to do with a 401(k) they left behind. There is a right answer and a wrong one, and the wrong one costs roughly thirty percent.
