Bay Area Estates and Tax Law Blog

Legions of taxpayers and estate holders in California and across the country have dreaded for years the acronym FATCA and what it stands for. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act enacted as federal law by Congress in 2010 has long been viewed as a near limitless power often wielded by the IRS in selective and unfair ways.

As noted in a recent national media piece on FATCA and its involvement in the courts, the legislation’s goal has been “to target the undeclared offshore accounts of Americans.” Revenue officials have consistently contended that FATCA’s reach is actually quite narrow, being focused solely on tax evaders. Special agents and law enforcers say that investigatory probes have always been aimed only at individuals and business entities that seek to avoid legal tax duties by hiding money outside the United States in offshore tax havens.

Many different things go through a person's mind when they are trying to devise an estate plan. These things include who is going to get what and how they want to make the transfers.

There are a lot of things that go into an estate plan that can discourage family members and heirs from fighting when a person passes away. In fact, preventing fights over the estate is a primary focus of estate planning. Here are some tips for minimizing the chance of an estate battle, and some points that matter if a dispute does happen:

Americans residing abroad or living domestically with overseas financial holdings have been a collectively peeved bunch for years in their dealings with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Legions of them have been notably put out -- and rendered fearful -- by agency exactions concerning their overseas financial holdings.

The cumulative stress is added to for many every time they confront any combination of these three tax-linked acronyms: FBAR, FATCA and OVDP.

In response to today's above-posed headline query, the answers are many.

Some parents or other loving caregivers feel stymied in their efforts to make long-term plans for children with special needs owing to what a recent media focus on the matter terms "interpersonal conflicts." That is, they begin to argue or disagree every time they broach a topic that they deem hyper-sensitive. An appreciable percent of respondents in a university-linked national survey stated that the topic was too "emotionally loaded" to even bring up.