Do I have to report a UK charity account on my FBAR if I do not own the money?

Yes. Under 31 CFR 1010.350 a United States person files FinCEN Form 114 where they have a financial interest in, or signature or other authority over, foreign financial accounts exceeding 10,000 US dollars in aggregate at any time in the calendar year. Signature authority is an independent trigger and ownership is not required. The account is reported in Part IV, the section for accounts over which the filer has authority but no financial interest.

I am one of three signatories on the charity mandate. Do I report only part of the balance?

No. You report the account's full maximum value during the year, converted at the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange for the last day of that year. The regulatory definition of signature or other authority expressly covers authority held alone or in conjunction with another, so a dual-signature requirement does not divide the duty. Every US person on the mandate files separately and in full for the same account.

Is there an exception for officers of charities, churches or sports clubs?

No. The signature authority exceptions at 31 CFR 1010.350(f)(2) are defined by employer type and cover officers and employees of examined banks, SEC or CFTC registered financial institutions, Authorised Service Providers to SEC-registered investment companies, and entities whose equity securities are listed on a US national securities exchange or registered under section 12(g). A UK charity, club or church falls outside all of them, and there is no de minimis relief for small community organisations.

Does the charity account also go on Form 8938?

No, and this is the one place the rules work in your favour. The IRS comparison of Form 8938 and FBAR requirements states that accounts over which you have signature authority only are not reportable on Form 8938 unless you hold some other interest in them. So the charity account belongs on FinCEN Form 114 and is left off the Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets that accompanies your return.

Can I still use the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures to fix the back years?

No. The IRS withdrew that published procedure on or around 1 July 2026 and it should not be treated as a live route, notwithstanding how often it is still cited online. The underlying protection survives in the Internal Revenue Manual at 4.26.16, which instructs that no penalty be asserted where the failure was not willful, was due to reasonable cause and the account is properly reported. The live routes are amended filings, late filings supported by a documented reasonable cause statement, or the Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures where there is also an income or return defect.

I resigned as trustee years ago and cannot get the old bank statements. What do I file?

You still report the years in which you held authority. Maximum values are reported on a reasonable, consistent and documented basis, reconstructed from the charity's published annual reports and accounts, committee minutes recording balances, and any treasurer's reports in your own records. Keep the working papers with the filing, since records supporting an FBAR must be retained for five years from the due date. Omitting the account because the evidence is inconvenient is the one approach that does not work.

Missed FBAR on a UK Charity Account You Signed For

A Missed FBAR on a UK charity account is one of the most common reporting failures we correct for US persons living in Britain, and the answer to the question behind it is uncomfortably short: if you could move the money, you had to report the account. Ownership is irrelevant. Under the regulation at 31 CFR 1010.350, a United States person files FinCEN Form 114 where they have a financial interest in, or signature or other authority over, foreign financial accounts whose aggregate value exceeded 10,000 US dollars at any time during the calendar year. Signature or other authority is an independent trigger. It sits alongside financial interest in the same sentence of the regulation, and nothing in that sentence asks whose money it is.

That is why a partner at a City firm who has never made a personal mistake on a tax return in twenty years can still carry six or seven unfiled years. The account was not theirs. It belonged to a village cricket club, a church, a prep school parents association, a grant-making foundation or a family charity set up after a liquidity event. The bank mandate named them because someone had to be named, and the reporting duty attached to the name rather than to the money.

This article deals only with the reporting of the account and the authority you hold over it. It does not touch the taxation of the organisation, and it does not need to, because the whole problem arises from the fact that the organisation itself is outside the US reporting system entirely.

Do You Report a UK Charity Account on Your FBAR If You Do Not Own the Money?

Yes, subject to a short list of exceptions that almost never apply to charity signatories. Signature authority reporting exists precisely to capture accounts you control but do not own. The IRS states the position plainly on its Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts page: a US person must file where they have signature or other authority over at least one financial account located outside the United States and the aggregate value of those accounts exceeded 10,000 US dollars at any time during the calendar year reported.

Two consequences follow immediately and both surprise people. First, you report the account's maximum value during the year, not the portion you might be thought to control and not a per-signatory share. A club account that peaked at 180,000 pounds after a capital appeal is reported at its full converted maximum by every US person on the mandate. Second, the charity itself reports nothing. A UK charity, whatever legal form it takes, is not a United States person as that term is defined in the regulation, so it has no FinCEN Form 114 obligation of its own. There is no consolidated filing standing behind you, no parent entity picking the duty up, and no institution that will file on the account's behalf. You are the only reporting point that exists.

What Does Signature or Other Authority Actually Mean?

Signature or other authority is the authority of an individual, alone or in conjunction with another, to control the disposition of money, funds or other assets held in a financial account by direct communication to the person with whom the account is maintained. That is the regulatory definition at 31 CFR 1010.350(f)(1), and every word of it does work.

The phrase in conjunction with another is the one that catches charity officers. A mandate requiring two signatures does not halve the duty or split it. Each person who must sign holds the authority in conjunction with another, and each files separately and in full. The phrase by direct communication matters too: the test is whether the bank will act on your instruction, not whether the committee has approved it first. Internal governance constraints, a treasurer's spending limit, a rule that payments above a certain size need a resolution, none of these remove the authority. They regulate how you are supposed to use it.

Equally, the definition sets a real floor. Authority you do not actually hold is not authority. These positions are outside the definition and are frequently misdiagnosed as inside it:

Read-only online banking access that lets you view balances and download statements but cannot initiate a payment.
Receiving bank statements, management accounts or a treasurer's report as a member of the governing body without being on the mandate.
Approving expenditure at a committee meeting where a different named signatory then instructs the bank.
Being listed on the charity's public register entry as a trustee while a separate finance sub-committee holds the banking mandate.
Holding a card on the account that can only be used for purchases within a preset limit, where you cannot direct or withdraw the underlying funds, although this one turns on the actual bank terms and should be documented rather than assumed.

The practical work in a remediation case is evidential rather than conceptual. We ask for the bank mandate and every variation to it, the minutes appointing and removing signatories, and the charity's own record of who held authority in each period. Those documents decide the answer. A job title does not.

Which UK Roles Create This Exposure Without Anyone Noticing?

The exposure is created by ordinary British civic life, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed. The positions that most often produce unfiled years in our caseload are these:

Trustee or treasurer of a registered charity, a charitable incorporated organisation or a charitable company, including a family foundation established after a business sale.
Treasurer or committee member of an unincorporated members club, a cricket or rugby club, a sailing club, a tennis club or a village hall committee.
Churchwarden, parochial church council treasurer or finance officer of a congregation, mosque, synagogue or temple.
Chair or treasurer of a school parents association, a friends of the school body, an alumni fund or a scholarship appeal.
Director or honorary officer of a residents management company, a leaseholder company or a service charge account holder, which is not a charity but produces an identical FBAR pattern.
Signatory on a UK grant-making foundation's deposit or investment cash account, where the balances are large and the account is almost never thought of as a personal reporting item.

None of these roles are paid, most are held out of civic duty, and that is the psychological problem. Nobody treats an unpaid appointment as an event with US tax consequences, so nobody mentions it to their preparer, and the preparer's standard questionnaire asks about accounts you own.

Is There a Charity or Nonprofit Exception to Signature Authority Reporting?

No. This is where a great deal of well-meaning internet guidance goes wrong, because there are exceptions, they are real, and they cover nothing a charity signatory does. The exceptions sit at 31 CFR 1010.350(f)(2) and they are drawn by reference to the employer, not the account. They relieve officers and employees of federally examined banks, of financial institutions registered with and examined by the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, of Authorised Service Providers to SEC-registered investment companies, of entities with a class of equity securities listed on a US national securities exchange, and of entities with equity securities registered under section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act. In each case the individual must have no financial interest in the account.

A UK charity, club or church is none of those things. There is no equivalent relief for unpaid office holders, no de minimis for small community organisations, and no exemption based on the fact that the funds are charitable. The absence is deliberate. The reporting regime is about visibility of control over foreign accounts, and control over a charitable account is still control.

One point of relief is worth stating because it cuts the other way. Accounts over which you hold signature authority only are not reportable on Form 8938, the Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets, unless you have some other interest in them. The IRS sets this out directly in its published comparison of Form 8938 and FBAR requirements. So the charity account belongs on FinCEN Form 114 and stays off your Form 8938, which is the reverse of what most people assume when they hear that two overlapping forms exist.

Why One Mandate Produces Several Missed FBAR Filings at Once

This is the angle nobody writes about, and it is the one that matters most when a charity discovers the issue. UK charity governance is built on plural authority. Charity Commission guidance for trustees, published on GOV.UK as CC3a alongside the fuller guidance CC3, requires trustees to manage the charity's resources responsibly and to put safeguards in place against fraud and loss. In practice that means a bank mandate with two or three authorised signatories and a dual authorisation rule for payments.

Good governance therefore multiplies the reporting duty. If a charity has three signatories and two of them are US citizens, that single account generates two complete and independent personal filings every year, each reporting the full maximum balance. Neither filer can rely on the other. Neither filer can rely on the charity.

There is a second consequence that practitioners underrate. Charity governance is public and archived. The charity register records who was appointed and when they ceased to act. Annual reports and accounts filed with the regulator name the trustees for each financial year. Minutes record mandate changes. Compared with a quietly held personal account, a charity signatory's history of authority is unusually easy to establish after the fact, in either direction. It supports a clean reconstruction of exactly which years were reportable, and it equally means the period of authority is not something that can be left vague.

How the Charity Account Interacts With Your Own Accounts

The 10,000 US dollar test is an aggregate one, applied across every foreign account in which you have a financial interest and every account over which you have signature authority, using each account's maximum value during the year. Signature authority accounts are thrown into the same pot as the accounts you own. That produces two results that run in opposite directions and both catch people out.

In one direction, a small charity account tips an otherwise sub-threshold person into filing. Someone holding a single UK current account with 7,000 pounds and a club account with 4,000 pounds is over the line and must report both. In the other direction, and far more commonly in the HNW population we act for, the individual was already comfortably over the threshold and filing every year. Their form was simply incomplete. Every year's FinCEN Form 114 omitted an account they were required to list. That is not a failure to file, it is a defective filing, and it is corrected by amendment rather than by a first-time delinquent submission. Diagnosing which of the two situations applies is the first thing we establish, because the remediation route differs.

How Do You Actually Report It on FinCEN Form 114?

Charity accounts go in Part IV of the form, headed Information on financial account or accounts where filer has signature or other authority but no financial interest in the account or accounts. Part IV exists solely for this situation, and the mechanics differ from the parts of the form that report your own accounts.

You complete the usual account identification, the account number, the name and address of the UK institution and the maximum value during the year. Items 34 through 43 then identify the owner of the account and your relationship to it. Item 34 takes the owner's last name or, for an entity, its legal name, so the charity's registered name is entered there exactly as the bank and the regulator hold it. Item 35 is the owner's taxpayer identification number, which a UK charity will not have, and the field is completed with what genuinely exists rather than with a guess or a placeholder. Items 36 through 42 cover the owner's remaining name and address details, and item 43 is the filer's title with this owner, where you enter your actual office, trustee, treasurer, churchwarden, committee member or authorised signatory. That single field is what tells FinCEN why a private individual is reporting a charity's bank account.

Two mechanical points close out the form. Maximum values are converted to US dollars using the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange for the last day of the calendar year being reported, not an annual average and not the rate on the day the balance peaked. And if you hold signature authority over 25 or more foreign accounts with no financial interest, the instructions let you report only the number of such accounts at item 14b and complete only items 34 through 43, provided you keep the underlying detail and produce it on request.

A Worked Example

Caroline Whitfield is a US citizen and long-term UK resident, a managing director in leveraged finance, married to a British national and filing US returns every year through a London firm. Her personal position is orderly. She reports her UK current and savings accounts, her brokerage account and her sterling deposit account on FinCEN Form 114 annually and has done so for a decade.

In 2019 she agreed to become treasurer of a registered charity running a music education programme in her borough. She was added to the bank mandate as one of two required signatories. The charity's current account moved between 40,000 and 260,000 pounds across the year depending on grant timing, and a separate deposit account held a reserve of around 300,000 pounds. Caroline signed off payments perhaps ten times a year and never regarded the money as anything to do with her.

Her FBARs for 2019 through 2025 were filed on time and were wrong every year, because Part IV was left empty and two accounts with a combined maximum well into six figures were omitted. The exposure is not the charity's money and never was. It is the accuracy of her own reports. The fix is an amended FinCEN Form 114 for each affected year, adding both accounts to Part IV with her title entered as Treasurer, supported by the mandate, the minutes of her appointment and the charity's bank records reconstructing the maximum values. Her co-signatory, also a US citizen, has a parallel and entirely separate set of amendments to make.

What Does a Missed FBAR Cost?

The civil penalty structure sits in Title 31 and is inflation adjusted through the table at 31 CFR 1010.821. A non-willful violation carries a statutory maximum of 10,000 US dollars, adjusted to 16,536 US dollars under the adjustment published in January 2025. A willful violation carries the greater of the adjusted 100,000 US dollar amount, being 165,353 US dollars, or 50 percent of the balance in the account at the time of the violation. The Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Bittner v. United States confirmed that the non-willful penalty is applied per report rather than per unreported account, which matters where a single form omitted several charity accounts.

Those are ceilings, not expectations. The Internal Revenue Manual at 4.26.16 instructs that the total non-willful penalties across all open years will not exceed 50 percent of the highest aggregate balance of all foreign financial accounts, and more importantly it instructs examiners that a penalty will not be asserted where the failure to report was not willful, was due to reasonable cause, and the account was properly reported on the delinquent FBAR. A charity signatory who never benefited from the funds, never concealed anything and derived no income from the account is close to the paradigm case that instruction contemplates.

How Do You Fix Back Years Now the Delinquent FBAR Page Has Gone?

The landscape changed in mid-2026 and the guidance still circulating online has not caught up. The IRS withdrew its published Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures webpage on or around 1 July 2026. For years that page gave a taxpayer-facing assurance that a late report meeting stated conditions would attract no penalty, and it is still cited constantly. It is no longer a live route and should not be relied on as one.

What survives is more durable than the webpage was. The Internal Revenue Manual instruction to examiners described above remains in force, and the IRS continues to state on its Details on reporting foreign bank and financial accounts page that it will not penalize those who properly report a foreign financial account on a late-filed FBAR where reasonable cause is established. The BSA E-Filing System still requires a reason for late filing to be selected and an explanation to be given. The practical routes now are these:

Amended FinCEN Form 114 filings for each year already reported, where the only defect is the omitted charity account, with the amendment reason and explanation completed carefully.
Late original FinCEN Form 114 filings supported by a contemporaneous, documented reasonable cause statement, where no form was filed for the year at all and no income was omitted from the US return.
The Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures, where the non-residency test is met and there is a genuine income or return defect sitting alongside the reporting failure, requiring Form 14653, three years of returns and six years of FBARs.
No action on years outside the assessment window, which is a determination to be made on the facts and documented, not assumed.

For a pure signature authority case, the streamlined programmes usually fit badly. They are built around unreported income and unpaid tax, and a charity treasurer has neither. There is no income to report, because the income belongs to the charity. Reaching for a programme designed to resolve an income failure in order to fix a reporting failure typically adds cost and disclosure without adding protection. The stronger position is a complete, accurate filing accompanied by a reasonable cause record that names the role, the mandate, the period of authority and the reason the duty was not identified. Build that record before filing, not after a notice arrives.

What If the Charity Will Not Release the Records?

This is the practical obstacle that stalls more remediations than any point of law, and it is worse for former officers. You resigned in 2021, the account was never yours, the current treasurer has no obligation to hand you seven years of bank statements, and the bank will not speak to someone who has come off the mandate.

The reporting duty is not suspended because the evidence is awkward to obtain. Maximum values are reported on a reasonable and documented basis, and the reconstruction sources are usually adequate. The charity's annual reports and accounts filed with the regulator show year-end funds and reserves. Committee minutes record balances at each meeting. Your own email archive frequently holds the treasurer's reports you once wrote. Where a figure remains genuinely uncertain, the defensible approach is to report on a consistent, conservative and fully documented basis and to keep the working papers, rather than to leave the account off. Records supporting a filing must in any event be retained for five years from the due date.

One point of reassurance is worth stating to anxious trustees, because it is the question that stops people acting. Reporting the account creates no exposure for the charity and no exposure for the other trustees. FinCEN Form 114 is an information report about accounts. It imposes no tax, transfers no liability to the organisation and does not place the charity into the US system. What it does is make your own filings complete. Where a second US person sits on the same mandate, they have their own duty, and the sensible course is for the charity to identify every US person who has held authority and let each of them deal with it properly.

A Missed FBAR arising from an unpaid civic role is, in our experience, among the most straightforward cross-border compliance failures to put right, provided it is approached as a preparation exercise with a documented evidential file rather than as an emergency. The facts are usually clean, the motive is transparently not concealment, and the record of who held authority is sitting in a public register waiting to be used.