FBAR and FinCEN Requirements for Cross-Border Founders

You formed the Delaware C-Corp, opened the US bank account, filed your first return. Feels like the compliance box is ticked. It usually is not.

Once your residency, your accounts, or your cap table touch more than one country, the reporting obligations start to stack. A lot of them route through one agency you may not have dealt with directly: FinCEN, the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It sits outside the IRS, runs its own filing system, and keeps its own deadlines. Two FinCEN filings catch cross-border founders more than any others, the FBAR and BOI. A third, Form 8938, looks almost identical to the FBAR but is actually an IRS form, which is exactly why founders mix them up.

Here is what each one is, who it hits, and what changed recently.

FBAR: the main FinCEN filing founders miss

FBAR is the Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts Report, filed on FinCEN Form 114. It goes to FinCEN through the BSA E-Filing System, not to the IRS, and it is never part of your tax return.

You file if you are a US person with a financial interest in, or signature authority over, foreign financial accounts, and the aggregate value of those accounts tops $10,000 at any point during the year.

Two details do most of the damage:

• "At any point" is literal. If your combined foreign balances cross $10,000 for a single day, you are in FBAR territory. The year-end balance is irrelevant.
• Signature authority counts. You can owe an FBAR on an account you do not own, like a company account abroad you are authorized to sign on. Control alone is enough.

The deadline is April 15, with an automatic extension to October 15. You do not request the extension, it just applies.

Worth flagging, since it came up a lot last year: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, did not touch the FBAR. Despite speculation that it would clean up duplicate foreign-asset reporting, the filing is still required, on the same threshold and the same deadline.

BOI: the FinCEN filing that just changed

Beneficial Ownership Information, filed under the Corporate Transparency Act, was the loudest compliance topic of 2024. It is also a FinCEN filing, and the rule flipped.

On March 26, 2025, FinCEN issued an interim final rule that exempts every entity created in the United States, including what used to be called domestic reporting companies, from BOI reporting. Their beneficial owners are exempt too. "Reporting company" now means only entities formed under the law of a foreign country that have registered to do business in a US state.

For your situation, that distinction is the whole story:

• Your Delaware C-Corp or US LLC is a US entity. Under the current rule, no BOI filing.
• The catch is a foreign-formed entity. If you also run a company incorporated in your home country and register it to do business in a US state, that foreign entity can still be a reporting company. Foreign companies registered before March 26, 2025 had until April 25, 2025 to file. Those registering after that date get 30 days from the notice that registration is effective.
• Even then, foreign reporting companies do not report US persons as beneficial owners.

Treat "exempt" as "exempt for now." This is an interim rule. FinCEN has said it intends to finalize it, the courts have kept the Corporate Transparency Act on the books (the Eleventh Circuit upheld it in December 2025), and bills are moving through Congress that could settle it either way. If you are reading BOI advice written before March 2025, assume it is out of date.

Form 8938: the one that is not actually FinCEN

This is where founders trip. Form 8938 looks like the FBAR's twin, but it is an IRS form, filed under FATCA and attached to your Form 1040. Different agency, different system, different thresholds.

Those thresholds are higher and they move with your filing status and where you live, from $50,000 for a single filer inside the US up to $600,000 for a married couple filing jointly and living abroad. Filing one form does not cover the other. Plenty of founders file both.

Form 8938 also reaches further than the FBAR. It picks up assets a bank statement will not show: foreign stock, partnership interests, equity in a foreign startup, holdings in non-US investment vehicles. If you hold equity outside the US or own through an overseas entity, this is the form that notices. Like the FBAR, it survived the OBBBA unchanged.

The short version: the FBAR goes to FinCEN, Form 8938 goes to the IRS, and meeting one threshold tells you nothing about the other.

When you own foreign entities, more forms appear

If your US startup owns or controls entities abroad, the heavier obligations often shift into the IRS international stack: Form 5471 for foreign corporations, Form 5472 for foreign-owned US entities and related-party transactions, Form 8865 for foreign partnerships, Form 926 for transfers to foreign corporations, on top of the FBAR and Form 8938 in your personal name.

These interact. One structuring decision can set off several filings at once. A US startup with an India subsidiary, for example, has to look at foreign ownership, intercompany transactions, and outbound transfers together rather than one at a time. The India-side books belong with a CA firm. The US filings are the piece we handle.

The mistakes that surface at tax season

• Assuming only large balances matter. $10,001 for one day triggers the FBAR.
• Treating incorporation as compliance. Forming the entity is the start. Ownership reporting, bookkeeping, and annual filings keep running after launch.
• Blurring personal and company obligations. Your personal foreign account, your company's foreign subsidiary account, and your stake in a foreign startup are three separate questions.
• Running on pre-2025 BOI advice. The rule that exempts your US entity is barely a year old.

What to do now

Start with a one-page inventory: every foreign account you can access (own or sign on), every foreign company you own, every foreign entity your startup controls.

Then run three checks. Are you a US person? Did your aggregate foreign accounts cross $10,000 at any point this year? Do any foreign assets cross the Form 8938 threshold for your filing status? Finally, confirm whether each entity is US-formed (BOI exempt for now) or foreign and registered in a US state (a possible reporting company).

Keep four records current all year, not just at filing time: foreign account balances, your cap table, intercompany transfers, and entity registrations.

The reason this gets messy is almost always the same. The data lives in someone's inbox instead of the books. We handle US incorporation, bookkeeping, tax, and compliance, so the records that drive your monthly close also feed these filings when they come due. Tie compliance to the close, and year-end stops being a scramble.