Transcript of the above video:

I haven't done a video recently on US Tax matters for Americans in Thailand but we have rolled over into 2023 and taxes are kind of on the horizon, we are looking ahead at April. More to the point for many folks here in Thailand, June oftentimes is more of an urgent issue for expats here in Thailand because generally speaking they get an automatic extension, oftentimes I end up having to extend further. I sometimes barely get, it's usually the end of the year or at least getting into the 4th quarter before I am able to get my taxes on file and things build up, whatever but we are getting into the so-called tax season as they say. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel which just basically said: "You should do a video on FBAR." So I thought I would go ahead and do another one of these videos. I did one of these years ago and I thought about just putting an answer to that question to that comment, a prior video, but I looked at the video and it's like 6 years old. I don't even think we had microphones when we started shooting those videos because we just started doing it and we did the best we could at the time. Hopefully now having ‘miked’ myself or our producer here having ‘miked’ me, we probably sound a little better. In any event what is the FEIE, the FBAR and the FATCA? 

Okay, FEIE, that is an acronym that stands for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. It basically is pretty much what the name sounds like. If you are an expat and you live abroad for 335 days a year, then your foreign earned income, there may be an exclusion. Currently it's a little over $100,000, well I don't know how far over 100,000, it adjusts for inflation. I probably should have checked the exact number before I got on this video. Long story short I think it is somewhere between $106 and probably $111,000 right now is the foreign earned income exclusion. So if you earn less than that amount of money abroad, you still have to file a tax return but you may not have any tax liability over that foreign earned income. 

Meanwhile, what's the FBAR? Well that is Foreign Bank Account Reporting. You have to deal with FinCen under the Treasury and basically foreign bank account reporting, you basically just have to disclose the existence of any one or more bank accounts with $10,000 or more in the aggregate held on account in any of those accounts. That is a pretty low number in modern times; bear in mind this stuff was promulgated like back when Pablo Escobar was a major fugitive so again the amounts associated with FBAR filing have not tracked very well with inflation. That might have been intentional on the part of the Statute drafters but long story short, foreign bank account reporting is required by Expat Americans who are living abroad and maintain bank accounts outside of the United States. 

Finally we get to FATCA which is the Foreign Account, I think it stands for the Foreign Account Transparency Compliance Act which basically is sort of a proactive if you will, enforcement function of the US Government. This was legislation promulgated under Obama and we are still dealing with it. Basically under FATCA, essentially Banks abroad have to disclose to the US Government that they have American Account holders and they have to provide the relevant information on those American Account holders back to the US Government. Now the question that is often posed by lay people in this regard is, "well how can they do that, it's a foreign jurisdiction?" The way that they do it is that they impose withholding taxes and fines on any banks that have to do business in the United States that have foreign account holders overseas. If they don't disclose them, they end up in all kinds of problems. Net result is the Bank kind of ends up acting as an enforcement arm of the overall policies associated with FACTA. 

So the thing to take away from this video is those are sort in my mind the three FS, the Trifecta of expat, I mean and this is just broad general stuff, look expat taxes can get very, very complex especially in an individual basis. But long story short and the thing to take away from this video, that is the three kind of things to keep in mind if you are looking to move abroad are the Foreigner Income Exclusion, the Foreign Bank Account Reporting requirements and then the heightened if you will, scrutiny associated with those requirements under FATCA.