Do I have to report a UK bridging loan on my FBAR?

No, not the loan itself. FinCEN Form 114 reports financial accounts, and the FinCEN instructions define a financial account as a securities, brokerage, savings, demand, checking, deposit, time deposit or other account maintained with a financial institution or other person performing the services of a financial institution, together with cash-value insurance and annuity policies and shares in a mutual fund or similar pooled fund. A loan is a liability and does not appear on the form at all. The reporting question is about the accounts opened alongside the loan, such as a drawdown account, a designated solicitor deposit account or a receipts account, each of which is tested on its own facts.

Is a development finance retention account reportable if I cannot touch the money?

It depends on whether an account exists and whose name it is in, not on whether you can spend the balance. Where the lender has simply not advanced the undrawn funds, there is no account maintained for you and nothing to report. Where the funds have been advanced into a designated account in your name or your company's name and then restricted pending monitoring surveyor certificates, you are the owner of record, and the FinCEN instructions give a US person a financial interest in an account where that person is the owner of record or holder of legal title regardless of whether the account is maintained for that person's benefit or for another's. A restriction or a lender's charge is not an exemption.

My UK limited company borrowed, not me. Do I still have an FBAR obligation?

Very possibly, on two separate grounds. The FinCEN instructions give a US person a financial interest in an account where the owner of record is a corporation in which the US person owns directly or indirectly more than 50 percent of the total value of shares or more than 50 percent of the voting power. Separately, a US person who is a director able to instruct the bank has signature authority over the company's accounts irrespective of ownership, and Publication 5569 confirms that whether the authority was ever exercised is irrelevant. Ownership-based accounts go in Part II or Part III of Form 114, signature authority accounts in Part IV.

Does retained interest deducted from a bridging advance create a reportable account?

Usually not. In the standard retained interest structure the lender agrees a gross facility, deducts interest for the expected term and advances the net, and the retained amount is an entry in the loan ledger rather than money held for you at any institution. The same applies to a pure roll-up where unpaid interest is added to the balance. The answer changes if a particular facility opens a designated interest account in your name at a bank or credits a separate reserve that is shown on statements and refundable to you, so the facility letter and completion statement need to be read rather than assumed.

What is the FBAR threshold and is it per account?

It is an aggregate threshold. A US person must file if the aggregate value of foreign financial accounts exceeds 10,000 US dollars at any time during the calendar year, and once it is exceeded every foreign account is reported however small. Publication 5569 gives the example of accounts worth 100, 12,000 and 3,000 US dollars: all three are reported because the aggregate is 15,100. Value is the maximum reached during the year, not the year-end balance, converted at the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange for the last day of the calendar year.

How do I file a missed FBAR now that the IRS Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures page has gone?

Through the BSA E-Filing System itself. The IRS page describing the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures was withdrawn in 2026 and should not be treated as a live route. Publication 5569 sets out the surviving mechanism: file the late FBAR electronically for the calendar year concerned, then explain the late filing by selecting a reason from the drop-down list on the header page or selecting Other and entering up to 750 characters of explanation, including whether the filing is made in conjunction with an IRS compliance option. If the account is properly reported and the IRS determines the violation was due to reasonable cause, no penalty is imposed. Where unreported income is also involved, assess the streamlined procedures before filing anything.

Missed FBAR: UK Bridging and Development Finance

Missed FBAR reporting around a UK bridging loan or a property development facility almost always happens for one reason: the borrower reasons that a loan is money owed rather than money held, and stops there. That reasoning is correct about the loan itself. A bridging facility or a development loan is a liability, and a liability is not a foreign financial account for FinCEN purposes. The exposure sits in the accounts that open up alongside the lending, namely the drawdown or facility account, the retained interest or roll-up arrangement, the retention holding undrawn build funds, the completion money sitting with a solicitor, and the rent or receipts account assigned to the lender as security. Some of those are reportable and some are not, and which is which turns on facts rather than on the label the lender puts on the paperwork.

The intuition is the trap, and it is a well-founded intuition, which is why it is so effective at suppressing the question. A US person who borrows in Britain rarely opens anything that feels like an investment account. A bridge completes, money moves, a project runs and the loan is redeemed on exit. In between, a development facility in particular can involve four or five separate pots of money sitting with a UK bank, a UK lender or a UK solicitor, any one of which can exceed 10,000 US dollars on its own for a matter of weeks. The FBAR threshold is an aggregate threshold tested against the maximum value of every foreign account at any time during the calendar year, so a pot that existed for a fortnight can pull an entire year into reporting.

What follows is written for the position we prepare for every filing season: US citizens, Green Card holders, dual nationals and Accidental Americans who trade or develop UK property, either in their own name or through a UK limited company. It is not about a solicitor client money account on an ordinary conveyance, a tenancy deposit scheme account, a landlord rent account or a UK peer to peer lending account, each of which we deal with separately. The subject here is narrower and less well covered: the accounts that exist specifically because you borrowed short term and secured against UK property.

Why a Bridging Loan by Itself Is Not a Foreign Financial Account

Start with the definition FinCEN actually publishes rather than with the intuition. The FinCEN Form 114 instructions state that a financial account includes, but is not limited to, a securities, brokerage, savings, demand, checking, deposit, time deposit, or other account maintained with a financial institution or other person performing the services of a financial institution. The definition then adds commodity futures or options accounts, an insurance policy with a cash value, an annuity policy with a cash value, and shares in a mutual fund or similar pooled fund. Every single item on that list is a place where value is held for the account holder.

A loan agreement is the mirror image. It is a contractual promise by you to pay a sum to the lender. Nothing is being held for you at the institution by virtue of the loan contract alone. That is why a UK mortgage, a UK bridging facility and a UK development loan are not, standing alone, reportable on FinCEN Form 114, and why the balance owed never appears anywhere on the form. FBAR is not a net worth return and it is not a balance sheet. It reports accounts, not debts.

There is a valuation instruction that people misread as supporting a broader rule, and it is worth clearing up. FinCEN's guidance on reporting maximum account value states that after determining the value of the account, if the value results in a negative value, you enter zero in item 15. That is an instruction about how to fill in a box on an account you have already decided is reportable. It is not authority that a negative balance removes an account from the regime. A current account that happens to be overdrawn during the year is still an account maintained with a financial institution, and the instruction tells you to report it with a maximum value of zero rather than leave it off. The correct question is never whether the balance was positive. It is whether there is an account maintained for you at all.

What FinCEN Counts as a Foreign Account, Precisely

Three technical points decide most of the bridging and development cases, and all three come straight from the FinCEN Form 114 instructions and the IRS FBAR Reference Guide, Publication 5569.

Location, not nationality. A foreign financial account is a financial account located outside the United States. The FinCEN instructions give the two mirror examples: an account maintained with a branch of a United States bank that is physically located outside the United States is a foreign financial account, while an account maintained with a branch of a foreign bank that is physically located in the United States is not. A sterling account with the London branch of an American bank is therefore foreign for this purpose.
Or other person performing the services of a financial institution. This clause is the one that does the heavy lifting in property finance. It is why money held by a party who is not itself a bank can still sit in a reportable financial account, and it is the reason solicitor-held and lender-held pots cannot be dismissed simply because the holder does not have a banking licence.
Income is irrelevant. Publication 5569 gives the example of Diane, a US person who owns a foreign financial account with a maximum value of 15,000 US dollars that produces no income at all. Diane must still file. A non-interest-bearing development account is in exactly the same position.

The aggregation rule matters just as much as the definition. Publication 5569 works it through with an example: Craig owns foreign financial accounts X, Y and Z with maximum values of 100 US dollars, 12,000 US dollars and 3,000 US dollars. Because the aggregate is 15,100 US dollars, Craig must report all three accounts, including the two that are individually far below the threshold. A second example makes the point harder still: Kristin holds 3,000, 1,000 and 8,000 US dollars across three accounts, none of which breaches 10,000 on its own, and must report all three. Applied to a development, this means a short-lived drawdown account of a few thousand pounds is reportable once your existing UK current account and savings take the aggregate over the line.

How UK Bridging and Development Finance Is Actually Built

The FCA Handbook glossary defines a bridging loan as an MCD exempt bridging loan, or, failing that, a regulated mortgage contract which has a term of twelve months or less. Most investor and developer lending falls outside the regulated perimeter entirely because it is business lending secured on property that is not the borrower's home, which is precisely why the documentation varies so much between lenders and why no single answer fits every facility.

The interest mechanics are worth understanding because they drive the account question. The FCA's responsible lending rules in MCOB 11.6 permit a firm to enter into a regulated mortgage contract that is an interest roll-up mortgage or a retained interest mortgage only in defined cases, which include a bridging loan, a loan to a high net worth mortgage customer, and a loan solely for business purposes. Roll-up and retained interest are therefore normal features of this market rather than exotic ones, and they are the two structures most likely to be mistaken for a held fund.

On the development side, the pattern is a gross facility drawn in tranches. An initial advance funds the land or the acquisition. Further tranches are released against build stages, each one certified by an independent monitoring surveyor appointed by the lender at the borrower's cost, who confirms that the works claimed have actually been done and that the remaining budget is sufficient to finish. The undrawn balance sits with the lender until the next certificate. A small percentage is commonly held back to the end against snagging.

That gives you a finite set of structures to test. The useful discipline is to list them for a specific deal and run each one separately rather than reaching for a single answer.

A drawdown or facility account in the borrower's own name at a UK bank, into which tranches are paid and out of which the builder is paid.
A retained interest or interest roll-up arrangement, where interest is deducted from the gross advance at the outset or accrued and added to the balance.
A retention account holding undrawn development funds, released against monitoring surveyor certificates.
A cleared funds or completion account held by a UK solicitor, holding your equity contribution and the lender's advance in the days around completion.
A rent, receipts or rental income account assigned or charged to the lender as security during the term of the facility.

The Drawdown or Facility Account in Your Own Name

This is the easiest of the five and the one most often missed, because it does not feel like a bank account so much as a conduit. If a UK bank opens an account in your name or in the name of your company, pays tranches into it, issues statements on it, and lets you instruct payments out of it to contractors, it is an account maintained with a financial institution located outside the United States. That is the definition met on its face. Nothing about the money having been borrowed changes the analysis, and nothing about the money leaving quickly changes the analysis either, because FBAR reports the maximum value at any time during the calendar year rather than a year-end balance.

The practical error we see is a developer who reasons that the drawdown account had a closing balance of nil on 31 December, so there was nothing to report. FinCEN's guidance is explicit that the maximum value is a reasonable approximation of the greatest value of currency and non-monetary assets in the account during the calendar year, and that periodic account statements may be relied on to determine it provided the statements fairly reflect that maximum. A 600,000 pound tranche that landed in March and was spent by May is reported at its March peak.

Retained Interest and Roll-Up: Usually a Ledger, Not an Account

Retained interest is the structure that most reliably produces a false positive. The lender agrees a gross facility, deducts the interest for the expected term up front, and advances the net. Borrowers often describe this as the lender holding their interest for them, and from there it is a short step to assuming there is a reportable pot.

Usually there is not. In the standard retained interest structure no separate account is opened anywhere. The retained interest is an accounting entry within the loan ledger: the gross facility is what you owe, the net advance is what you receive, and the difference is never held for you at any institution. The same is true of a pure roll-up, where unpaid interest is simply added to the outstanding balance each month. A ledger showing a debt getting larger is not a financial account.

The honest qualification is that this is a facts question, not a rule. If a particular facility does open a designated interest account in your name at a bank, or credits a separate interest reserve that is shown to you on bank statements and can be refunded to you on early redemption, you are no longer looking at a ledger entry. The test is whether an account is maintained with a financial institution or a person performing the services of one. Read the facility letter and the completion statement, and if the arrangement produces a refund of unused retained interest on early exit, establish where that money sat in the meantime.

The Retention Account: Undrawn Development Funds Held Back by the Lender

This is the fact pattern nobody writing about FBAR addresses, and it is the one where developers are most confident and most exposed. The retention is the part of an agreed facility that the lender has not yet released, or has released and then held back, pending certification. The developer's instinctive position is that it is not his money because he cannot touch it. That instinct sometimes produces the right answer and sometimes produces a missed report, and the two cases look almost identical from the outside.

Work it in both directions. In the first and more common case, there is no account at all. The lender has simply not advanced the money. The retention exists as a figure in a facility agreement and a line on a drawdown schedule, and the funds remain the lender's own working capital until a monitoring surveyor certificate triggers a payment. On those facts there is nothing maintained for you, nothing in your name, no statement, no account number, and no financial account within the FinCEN definition. The obligation to report simply does not arise, and the fact that the total facility exceeds 10,000 US dollars is beside the point.

In the second case, the money has been advanced into a designated account and then restricted. Some development structures work this way, particularly where a lender wants the full facility drawn for its own funding reasons, or where a cost overrun contribution from the borrower is placed on deposit. Here there is an account with a number, statements are produced, interest may accrue on the credit balance, and the balance is released to the borrower or to contractors as certificates are issued. If that account is in the borrower's name, or in the name of a company the US person owns, the first limb of the financial interest test is met: the FinCEN instructions say a US person has a financial interest where that person is the owner of record or holder of legal title, regardless of whether the account is maintained for the benefit of the US person or for the benefit of another person. Being unable to draw the money at will does not defeat ownership of record.

Between those two poles sit the harder cases, and they are resolved by evidence rather than by argument. Ask four questions of any retention: whose name is on the account, who receives the statements, who can direct the disposition of the funds by communicating with the institution, and whether the money would be returned to you or retained by the lender if the facility were cancelled tomorrow. An account in the lender's own name, funded by the lender, which returns nothing to you on cancellation, is the lender's account. An account in your name over which the lender holds a charge or a blocking undertaking is your account with a restriction attached, and a restriction is not an exemption.

Cleared Funds and Completion Money Held by a Solicitor

Short-term lending runs on solicitor-held money. Your deposit or equity contribution goes to your conveyancer days before completion, the lender's advance arrives the morning of completion, and both sit in client account until the transaction completes. On a bridge that funds an auction purchase, the period can be short and the sums very large.

Whether this creates a reportable account is genuinely fact-dependent, and the relevant clause is the one about a person performing the services of a financial institution. A pooled general client account operated by the firm, in the firm's name, over which you have no ability to communicate with the bank and no designated balance, is a weaker case for reporting than a designated deposit account opened in your name or in your company's name at the firm's instruction, with a separate account number and a statement. The second arrangement looks much more like an account maintained for you. Because this overlaps with the general solicitor client money question we address separately, the specific point to take here is that bridging and auction purchases regularly produce the designated version rather than the pooled version, precisely because the sums are large and the interest matters.

A Rent or Receipts Account Assigned to the Lender as Security

Where a bridge is serviced rather than rolled up, or where a development converts to an investment facility on completion, lenders frequently take an assignment of rental income and require it to be paid into a nominated account. The borrower then cannot move the money without the lender's consent, and in a default scenario the lender sweeps it.

This is the clearest example of why restriction is not the test. If the account is in your name or your company's name at a UK bank, you are the owner of record, the money is yours subject to a security interest, and the account is a foreign financial account. A charge over an account changes who ranks first in an insolvency. It does not change who holds legal title to the account, and the FinCEN financial interest definition is written around ownership of record and legal title, not around unrestricted access. The analysis changes only if the account is genuinely in the lender's name or in the name of a receiver, in which case you would test whether you nonetheless have signature authority over it.

Restricted, Charged and Blocked Accounts, and the Maximum Value Problem

Pulling those threads together gives a working rule for this whole area. Reportability follows the existence of an account and your relationship to it. It does not follow your freedom to spend the balance. FinCEN's two hooks are financial interest, which is about ownership of record, legal title and specified entity ownership thresholds, and signature authority, which the instructions define as the authority of an individual, alone or in conjunction with another individual, to control the disposition of assets held in a foreign financial account by direct communication, whether in writing or otherwise, to the bank or other financial institution that maintains the account. Neither hook contains a carve-out for money you cannot currently withdraw.

Valuation is where restriction causes real practical difficulty, because lenders and solicitors are often slow to produce statements for accounts the borrower does not operate. FinCEN's instructions anticipate this. Item 15a on Form 114 is an amount unknown box, to be checked where the value of the account cannot be determined. That is an available answer, and it is a far better answer than omitting the account. Item 16 asks for the type of account and offers Bank, Securities or Other, with a free text description where Other is selected, which is the right place to describe a retention or a designated development account accurately rather than forcing it into a category that does not fit.

Value each account separately, then aggregate. The 10,000 US dollar test is applied to the aggregate maximum, and once it is breached every foreign account is reported, however small.
Use the greatest value during the calendar year, not the year-end balance, and rely on periodic statements only where they fairly reflect that maximum.
Convert using the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange for the last day of the calendar year, and round amounts up to the next whole dollar.
Where two or more persons jointly hold an account, each US person reports the entire value of the account, not a share of it.
Where the value genuinely cannot be established, check the amount unknown box rather than leaving the account off the form.

Missed FBAR Exposure When the Borrower Is Your SPV

Most serious UK development is done through a single purpose limited company, one project per company, and this is where the second commonly missed exposure lives. The accounts belong to the company, the company is not a US person, and the developer concludes that the company's banking is outside the US reporting system. That conclusion is wrong in a way that is easy to demonstrate from the instructions.

The FinCEN Form 114 instructions state that a US person has a financial interest in a foreign financial account where the owner of record or holder of legal title is a corporation in which the US person owns directly or indirectly more than 50 percent of the total value of shares of stock, or more than 50 percent of the voting power of all shares of stock. A parallel rule catches partnerships on a more than 50 percent profits or capital test, and a residual rule catches any other entity in which the US person owns directly or indirectly more than 50 percent of the voting power, total value of equity interest or assets, or interest in profits. Publication 5569 works the indirect case through an example in which a US person who owns 75 percent of a US corporation, which in turn owns 100 percent of a foreign company with foreign accounts, must file because of the indirect ownership.

So if you own more than 50 percent of the SPV, the SPV's drawdown account, its retention account if there is one, and its receipts account are all accounts in which you personally have a financial interest. They go in Part II of your own Form 114 if you hold them separately, and each account is reported at its full maximum value. The threshold is strictly more than 50 percent, so a genuine 50 50 joint venture with an unconnected developer does not trigger this limb, which is exactly why the next point matters so much.

Signature Authority as a Director, and How It Sits With Form 5471

Signature authority is an entirely separate hook and it catches people who fall below the ownership threshold. A US person who is a director or officer of the SPV and can instruct the bank to move money has signature authority over the company's accounts regardless of how much of the company he owns. Publication 5569 makes the crucial point through the example of Megan, who holds a power of attorney over accounts in Canada and has never once exercised it: whether or not she ever exercised the authority is irrelevant to the filing requirement. The capacity is what counts.

The practical consequence for a 50 50 joint venture SPV is that the ownership limb fails and the signature authority limb succeeds. Those accounts are reported in Part IV of Form 114, which covers accounts where the filer has signature authority but no financial interest, and Part IV requires the name, address and identifying number of the account owner as well as the account details. A US person who is both a majority owner and a signatory reports under the financial interest limb.

This sits alongside, and is entirely separate from, the Form 5471 that the same person may owe on the same company. Form 5471 is an income tax information return filed with your Form 1040 under Internal Revenue Code sections 6038 and 6046. A Category 4 filer is a US person who had control of a foreign corporation during its annual accounting period, and a Category 5 filer is in general a US shareholder who owned stock in a foreign corporation that was a controlled foreign corporation. FinCEN Form 114 is filed separately, electronically, with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network under a Bank Secrecy Act provision of Title 31, not under the Internal Revenue Code. The two have different filing addresses, different deadlines, different penalty regimes and different tests. Filing one does not satisfy the other, and the FinCEN instructions confirm that the federal tax treatment of an entity does not determine whether the entity has an FBAR filing requirement, so even an entity that is disregarded for income tax purposes can have its own FBAR obligation.

A Worked Scenario: One Development, Four Possible Accounts

Take a US citizen resident in London who buys a site through a newly formed UK limited company in which she holds 100 percent of the shares, and who is also its sole director. The company takes a development facility. Her equity contribution of 400,000 pounds goes to the solicitor in February and sits in a designated deposit account opened in the company's name at the solicitor's instruction until completion three weeks later. The lender advances the land tranche of 1.2 million pounds into a development account in the company's name at a UK bank. Build tranches of roughly 300,000 pounds each are released against monitoring surveyor certificates over the following year into the same account. Interest is retained from the gross facility at the outset. On practical completion, the first two flats are let and the rent is paid into a nominated receipts account in the company's name over which the lender holds a charge.

Run the five structures. The development account is in the company's name, she owns more than 50 percent of the company, so she has a financial interest in it and reports it at its maximum value during the year, which is the peak reached in the days after the land tranche landed. The designated solicitor deposit account is in the company's name with its own number and statements, so on these facts it is a further account in which she has a financial interest, reported at 400,000 pounds converted at the year-end rate. The receipts account is hers through the company and the lender's charge does not change that, so it is reported as well. The retained interest is not an account because it was never advanced and never held for the company, so nothing is reported for it. The undrawn balance of the facility is likewise not an account: it remained the lender's money until each certificate released it, and she reports the tranches only once they arrived in the development account.

Three reportable accounts, not five and not zero. She would also be a Category 4 Form 5471 filer on the same company for the same year, filed with her Form 1040 and entirely separate from the Form 114.

How to Correct a Missed FBAR Through BSA E-Filing

There is a point of currency here that matters. The IRS page setting out the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures was withdrawn in 2026 and is no longer published. It should not be relied on, quoted or presented as a live route, and any guide still describing it as the standard fix for a pure FBAR omission is out of date. What remains is the mechanism built into the filing system itself, plus the statutory defence.

Publication 5569 sets out the mechanism directly. When a US person learns they should have filed an FBAR for an earlier year, they should electronically file the late FBAR using the BSA E-Filing System. The calendar year being reported, including past years, is entered on the online FinCEN Form 114. The filer then explains the late filing, either by selecting a reason from the drop-down list on the header page or by selecting Other and entering up to 750 characters of free text to explain the late filing or to indicate whether the filing is made in conjunction with an IRS compliance option. The FinCEN instructions describe the same step: if the report is being late filed, meaning filed after 15 October of the year following the reporting year, make a selection from the drop-down list to indicate the reason, and if none of the provided selections explains it, select other and provide a written explanation.

Correcting an FBAR that was filed but filed wrongly is a different operation. You file a new, complete FBAR and select Amendment as the submission type, providing the Prior Report BSA Identifier from the acknowledgement you received. If that identifier cannot be found, the instructions direct you to enter 00000000000000 in the field. Publication 5569 also addresses the position where you simply do not have everything by the October extension date: file as complete an FBAR as possible and amend it when more or new information becomes available.

Two constraints frame all of this. The IRS states that if it has not contacted you about a late FBAR and you are not under civil or criminal investigation, you should file late FBARs as soon as possible to keep potential penalties to a minimum. That window closes once contact is made. And where the missed FBAR sits alongside unreported UK income, which is common where a development has produced rental profits or a chargeable gain, the correction is not a standalone FBAR exercise and should be assessed against the streamlined procedures before anything is filed.

Reasonable Cause and What the Statute Actually Requires

The reasonable cause standard is statutory rather than administrative, which is the reason it survives the withdrawal of any particular IRS webpage. Publication 5569 states the operative proposition plainly: if the filer properly reports the foreign financial account on a late-filed FBAR, and the IRS determines the FBAR violation was due to reasonable cause, no penalty will be imposed. The civil non-willful penalty authority sits at 31 USC section 5321(a)(5)(B) and the willful penalty authority at section 5321(a)(5)(C), with the maximum amounts set out in 31 CFR 1010.821 and adjusted annually for inflation, so we do not quote fixed figures. On the criminal side, Publication 5569 sets out a penalty of up to 250,000 US dollars or five years for failure to file an FBAR or retain required records, rising to up to 500,000 US dollars or ten years where the violation occurs while violating certain other laws.

For a bridging or development case, reasonable cause is usually argued on the structure rather than on ignorance of the law generally. The credible version is specific: the account was opened by a lender or a solicitor rather than by the taxpayer, no statements were ever sent to the taxpayer, the taxpayer had no ability to operate the account, and the existence of an account as opposed to a ledger entry was not apparent from any document the taxpayer received. Contemporaneous evidence carries that argument. An assertion that the loan felt like a liability does not, because the loan was a liability and that was never the issue.

Records to Keep on a UK Development Facility

The FinCEN instructions impose a record keeping obligation independent of the filing obligation. Persons required to file an FBAR must retain records containing the name in which each account is maintained, the number or other designation of the account, the name and address of the foreign financial institution that maintains the account, the type of account, and the maximum account value of each account during the reporting period. Those records must be retained for five years from 15 April of the year following the calendar year reported, or the date filed if that is later, and must be available for inspection as provided by law. Retaining a copy of the filed FBAR helps satisfy the requirement. An officer or employee who files an FBAR to report signature authority over an employer's foreign financial account is not required to personally retain records regarding those accounts.

Development records decay quickly because facilities are closed and SPVs are struck off. Keep the facility letter and any variation, the completion statement showing the net advance and any retained interest, the drawdown schedule, every monitoring surveyor certificate and the payment it triggered, statements for every account opened in your name or the company's name, and any deed of assignment or charge over an account. Five years after the year in which the project ran is a long time in property, and reconstructing a peak balance from a struck-off company's banking is materially harder than keeping the statement.

Where This Turns on Facts Rather Than Rules

There is no bright-line rule in the FinCEN material that says a development retention is or is not reportable, and any source that states one is overstating its position. What there is is a definition of a financial account, a definition of financial interest built on ownership of record and legal title plus specified entity ownership thresholds, a definition of signature authority built on the ability to control disposition by direct communication with the institution, and an aggregation rule measured on maximum value. Those four instruments answer every structure in this article once you establish the facts.

So the work is evidential. For each pot of money attached to the facility, establish whether an account exists with an institution or a person performing the services of one, establish whose name is on it, establish who can instruct the institution, and establish the greatest balance it reached during the calendar year. A missed FBAR in this area is very rarely a failure to understand the law. It is a failure to notice that an account was opened at all.