If you are a US citizen or a green card holder and have any foreign accounts, you may be required to file an FBAR. The Foreign Bank Account Report (FBAR), also known as FinCEN Form 114, is a report filed with the United States Treasury Department that discloses information about foreign bank and financial accounts. Contrary to popular belief, this form is not part of your taxes.
Failing to file an FBAR can result in significant penalties, so it's important to understand your obligations and file this form correctly. In this article, we will cover how to easily file your FBAR with Canua in just 5 minutes!
The FBAR must be filled electronically and is due on April 15th of each year however, FinCen automatically grants an extension of the filing until October 15th.
To determine if you have to file an FBAR you need to check two tests:
You are a US Person with ownership or signature authority over one or more foreign bank accounts and;
The combined value of those accounts was above $10,000 at any given point during the year.
If you are married or jointly own foreign financial accounts with your spouse, you can file a joint FBAR. However, if your spouse has separately owned accounts you must file your FBARs separately, each including your jointly held accounts.
Minors are also required to file an FBAR if they check the two prerequisites listed above. If you are the parent or guardian of a child, you have to file an FBAR on their behalf.
Not filing an FBAR may result in significant penalties. The IRS may impose a civil penalty of $12,459 per violation, and in cases of "wilful violations," the penalty is increased to the greater of $124,588 or 50% of the amount in the account at the time of the violation. In some cases, failing to file an FBAR can even incur in criminal penalties.
Now that you know a little bit more about the FBAR, let's go over the process of filing it with Canua in just 5 minutes!
Prior to filing your FBAR it's important to have your relevant foreign accounts connected. These foreign accounts include but are not limited to:
Bank accounts (checking and savings) held in foreign banks or foreign branches of U.S. domiciled banks
Securities accounts (all your brokerages and stock trading apps fall into this category)
Insurance policies or annuity contracts with cash value
Mutual Funds
Retirement and Pension accounts
Debit and prepaid credit cards
❗️Important Note
The FBAR currently does not require reporting on cryptocurrencies, so you don't have to report any wallets or exchange accounts on your FBAR.
You can start by accessing the Data Sources menu and connecting your accounts.
As the FBAR requires reporting the maximum balance of each account during the year, you should have at least a year of historical data. Some banks however, do not make this data fully available through their APIs so, for these cases, we recommend importing bank statements vis CSV files. You can also use CSV files in situations where you can't find your institution listed.
🚸 FBAR & Children: You can (and should!) also file the FBAR for your children, all you need to do is connect their accounts and follow the process.
💡 Tip
If you are filing a joint FBAR with your partner, make sure to have their accounts connected as well. You can have a shared workspace by following these steps here.
Once you're done connecting your accounts, you can start filing your FBAR.
Start by accessing the menu Actions and then selecting the FBAR action. If you have already added all your accounts you can continue the process, else please refer to
At the moment, Canua only handles filing the FBAR for individuals who are filing for themselves or jointly with their partner. If that's your case, please click the first option and press Continue. If you represent another entity, please select that option, let us know more about your situation and we'll reach out when we support that feature.
Towards the end of the process you will be shown a summary of what is going to be filed. Make sure that all the relevant accounts are connected and the maximum amounts of each account are displayed.
If a certain account shows No Data it means that there's no data available from the year you're filing the FBAR. If you click the tooltip you will be able to either exclude the account from the FBAR or Add more data to it.
If the account shows a maximum amount but still has a tooltip, it's because the account doesn't show data for the whole year. It may the case that you have only opened that account halfway through the year, but it can also be the case that the bank is not sharing old enough data and you will need to upload a CSV with the rest of it.
Once you're happy with the data shown, click Submit.
If the process was successful, you will get the following message (see below) else, you can restart the process, or reach out to our team at contact@canua.com for further help.
Once there's confirmation from FinCEN, we'll reach out to you over email!
💡 Tip
Need more help? You can always reach out by using our chat box on the bottom right corner.