Q: My father, who was a Canadian citizen and resident, passed away personally owning a US real property and shares in US publicly traded companies all of which were bequeathed to me. The US title company advised that I need to get a closing letter from the IRS before they switch the title of the […]
Starting this month we will be issuing a weekly Q&A notes by bringing to your attention the most interesting (common? but not too boring) in our opinion question raised during the previous week. If you have a burning question, please send it to us via email and perhaps it will make it the next week’s […]
For Canadian Musicians and Athletes: Obtaining a Centralized withholding agreement The Function of a Centralized Withholding Agreement A Centralized Withholding Agreement (CWA) offers Canadian entertainers and athletes working in the United States (U.S) a practical method for decreasing the amount of tax withholdings on performance income earned in the U.S. Canadian athletes and musicians that are […]
by Roy Berg U.S./Canada Tax Lawyer, admitted in both Canada and the U.S. The following is a summary of an in-depth paper published by the Canadian Tax Foundation for its 2014 annual national conference, which you my find by clicking here. When stripped of its soul-crushing complexity, FATCA—including the Canada-U.S. intergovernmental agreement (the IGA) and the Canadian […]
As of March 1st, 2016 the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking order. The proposed rule will rearrange long-standing system of reporting foreign bank and financial accounts using form FinCen 114 or FBAR. FBAR applies to all U.S. taxpayers with foreign financial accounts that have an aggregate value […]
Outstanding or incomplete returns haunt some of us, and the IRS knows it. For those of you living abroad according to a completely different calendar, you have a better excuse than your peers living on American soil. But even so, chances are you can never quite forget that perhaps you haven’t filed a return in […]
Offshore Tax Evasion For the past 6 years or so we have been exposed to plenty of news in the media on how the US government through its Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury has been fighting offshore tax evasion. One of the important administration tools in this war on tax cheats has been […]
Letter Writing Campaign The new CRA Audit Letter Writing Campaign is designed to facilitate behavioral changes among a selected taxpayer population by providing the selected population with relevant information in order to improve their understanding of their current or past reporting requirements and guidance on how to correct any common errors. Correct Tax Affairs In […]
Foreign Students in the US There are over 1 million foreign students studying in the United States on a F, J, M or Q visa. Most of them have a healthy fear of making errors on their tax return or forgetting to file entirely. Errors or failure to file could result in fines, being reclassified as […]
Every taxpayer with US filing obligations, whether in the form of a tax return, a declaration of estimated tax payment or an informational disclosure, must be identified by a taxpayer’s identification number. Typically, such identification number is an individual’s social security number. If an individual is not eligible for a social security number, he or […]