For Americans abroad
Tell us where you live and find out whether your foreign accounts, local retirement products, non-US funds, or missed filings may create U.S. reporting exposure.
Educational only. No SSN or exact balances required.
IRS Compliance Risk Scanner
11 questions. No SSN, exact balances, or documents required.
This scanner is for educational purposes only, not tax, legal, accounting, or financial advice. Your result is based only on the answers you provide; compliance, liability, penalties and eligibility for any IRS procedure follow from your full facts.
What it checks
Whether your non-US accounts — bank, brokerage, pension where reportable, even a card wallet — together crossed $10,000 at any moment in the year. That is the FinCEN Form 114 threshold, and it is an aggregate high-water mark, not a year-end balance.
Whether your specified foreign financial assets reached the thresholds for someone living abroad: $200,000 at year end or $300,000 at any time if you file alone, $400,000 and $600,000 if you file jointly.
Whether you hold foreign mutual funds, ETFs or fund-based retirement products. Those are commonly PFICs, and the rule is generally one Form 8621 per PFIC, per year — which is why a robo-portfolio can be more paperwork than a rental property.
Whether there are years you did not file at all, and whether the Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures — the most recent 3 years of returns, the most recent 6 years of FBARs, a non-willfulness certification on Form 14653 — look like a fit.
How the result is built
Each answer maps to a reporting rule, and each rule carries a penalty the scanner uses to order the result: a non-willful FBAR failure is capped at $16,536 per late report after Bittner, a missing Form 8938 starts at $10,000, rising to a maximum of $50,000 for continued failure after IRS notice, and an unreported PFIC has no fixed penalty at all — it is taxed under the §1291 default, which is usually worse. You get the exposures in that order with a next step for each, on screen and, if you ask, by email. The same rules run with your real numbers when you start the free return draft, and when the catch-up route fits, the Streamlined preparation workspace coordinates the years before you file anything.
A short, no-pressure look at your situation — filing history, FBAR threshold, local retirement and fund exposure, and whether the Streamlined route fits. You leave with a clear next step either way.