If you have a foreign bank account and you haven't been filing FBARs, you have a problem with two very different sizes. Non-willful violations carry penalties of roughly ten thousand dollars per violation. Willful violations run up to half the account balance — per year. The entire game is which side of that line the government puts you on, and the facts you create now decide it.
The Compliance Paths
For taxpayers whose failure was non-willful, the Streamlined Filed Compliance Procedures are the workhorse: three years of amended returns, six years of FBARs, a certification of non-willfulness, and a penalty that is modest by comparison — or zero for those living abroad. For taxpayers with willfulness exposure, the calculus shifts toward the IRS Criminal Investigation voluntary disclosure practice, which trades higher penalties for protection from prosecution.
Choosing the wrong path is expensive in both directions. A willful taxpayer who files a streamlined certification has just signed a false statement under penalties of perjury. A genuinely non-willful taxpayer routed into voluntary disclosure pays multiples of what the law required.
Why This Is Attorney Work
The non-willfulness certification is the whole case. Building it requires an unvarnished conversation about how the accounts came to be, what you knew, and what the paper trail shows — exactly the conversation that must happen under attorney-client privilege, because if the answer turns out badly, the government can never hear it from your advisor.
Offshore enforcement runs on data now. Foreign banks report American account holders directly to the IRS under FATCA. The window for fixing this on your terms closes the day they find you first.