Late & Delinquent FBAR: Catch-Up Options for US Expats

Missing past FBARs (FinCEN Form 114) is one of the most common compliance gaps for Americans abroad. There are still published catch-up routes; the right one depends mainly on whether you also had unreported income or unfiled returns, and on whether the failure was non-willful. One of those routes changed shape in the summer of 2026, and this page says exactly how.

What the IRS withdrew on July 1, 2026

From 2014 the IRS published a page called the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures. For a taxpayer who was not under examination, had not been contacted about the FBARs, and had reported and paid tax on the account income, it said: file the late FBARs electronically with a statement of why they are late, and "the IRS will not impose a penalty for the failure to file the delinquent FBARs". On July 1, 2026 that page was removed from irs.gov — no release, no explanation. The IRS list of offshore compliance options (reviewed June 30, 2026) now names three routes: the Voluntary Disclosure Practice, the Streamlined procedures, and the delinquent international information return procedures. The FBAR page itself (reviewed July 30, 2026) now says only that late FBARs should be filed "as soon as possible to keep potential penalties to a minimum", with the reason for filing late.

What did not change. The statute is the same: 31 U.S.C. §5321 says the Treasury may impose a penalty, the non-willful maximum is per report (Bittner v. United States, 2023), and the reasonable-cause exception stands. The Internal Revenue Manual still carries the filing procedure — IRM 4.26.16.3.11, Delinquent FBAR Filing Procedures: file on the current electronic form, state the reason on page one — and the examiner standard: a penalty will not be asserted for an account where the failure was not willful, was due to reasonable cause, and the account is properly reported on the delinquent FBAR. The published promise went; the standard an examiner applies stayed.

Late FBAR filing vs Streamlined

At a high level, the choice still turns on whether only FBARs were missed, or whether income/returns were also affected:

Is there an FBAR amnesty?

Not by that name — and less of one than there was. Neither the IRS nor FinCEN has ever published a programme called an FBAR amnesty. The 2014 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program closed on September 28, 2018; the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures, the closest thing to a published penalty-free route, were withdrawn on July 1, 2026. What remains is what the law and the manual always said: a late FBAR filed with a genuine reasonable-cause explanation, where the income was reported, is a filing an examiner is directed not to penalise — and the Streamlined procedures, under which a non-willful taxpayer meeting the non-residency test files three returns and six FBARs with no offshore penalty. The Streamlined procedures have no announced end date either, and the IRS reserves the right to discontinue them at any time.

Non-willful vs willful — the dividing line

Penalty exposure and the appropriate pathway hinge on willfulness. Non-willful generally describes an inadvertent failure (not knowing about the FBAR, a good-faith misunderstanding), while willful suggests a voluntary, intentional disregard of a known duty. Willful conduct carries far harsher potential penalties and is treated very differently.

• Reasonable cause — a good-faith explanation for why the FBAR was missed — is now the thing the late filing rests on, not an extra.
• Non-willful cases generally have access to the Streamlined route or to late filing with a reasonable-cause statement.
• Willful cases involve potential civil and even criminal exposure and are not a do-it-yourself situation.