For twelve years, people who had never filed an FBAR but had reported all their income could rely on a short IRS page called the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures. File the missing reports, explain why they were late, and the IRS said it would not impose a penalty. In early July 2026 that page came down, without an announcement. If you have just discovered you should have been filing FBARs, here is what that change means and what your options are now.
What changed in July 2026
The written, public assurance is gone. The procedures page no longer exists, so there is no published IRS promise you can point to that a qualifying late FBAR will draw no penalty. Separately, the IRS has revised its Delinquent International Information Return Submission Procedures, which now say late information returns should be filed through normal procedures and that penalties may be assessed under existing rules.
What did not change
The law did not change. FBAR penalties are still discretionary, not automatic, and they are still considered through examination rather than generated by a late filing. The IRS's internal manual still tells examiners not to assert a penalty for a non-willful failure due to reasonable cause once the account is properly reported on the late FBAR. And the IRS's own instruction is unchanged: if it has not contacted you and you are not under civil or criminal investigation, file the late FBARs as soon as possible to keep potential penalties to a minimum. What you lost is certainty at the front end. What decides the outcome now is how well your reasonable cause is documented.
Route one: late filing with a reasonable cause explanation
If every dollar of income from your foreign accounts was already on your US returns and the tax was paid, and your only failure was the FBAR itself, you file the missing FBARs through FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System and explain the reason for the late filing in the space the system provides. That explanation is now doing the work the old procedures used to do, so it should be specific: when the accounts were opened, why you did not know, how you found out, and what you did next.
Route two: the streamlined filing compliance procedures
If you also left foreign income off your returns, interest on a fixed deposit, dividends from a foreign fund, gains on foreign shares, the streamlined procedures are built for you, provided your failure was non-willful and the IRS has not opened an examination of any of your years. Our streamlined domestic offshore procedures service prepares the full submission.
The streamlined domestic offshore procedures are for people living in the United States who filed their original returns for the most recent three years; they amend returns, they do not replace returns that were never filed. Under them, you file amended returns for the most recent three years with any missing information returns such as Form 8938, file FBARs for the most recent six years, pay the tax and interest, certify on Form 14654 that your failure was non-willful, and pay a miscellaneous offshore penalty of 5% of the highest year-end total of the foreign assets that should have been reported. In exchange, FBAR penalties, information return penalties and accuracy-related penalties do not apply to those filings. The package is mailed on paper to a dedicated IRS address, and the FBARs are filed electronically with "Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures" given as the reason for filing late.
If you qualify as living abroad, generally no US abode and at least 330 full days outside the United States in one of the last three years, the streamlined foreign offshore procedures apply instead, and there is no miscellaneous offshore penalty.
Route three: when there is any question of willfulness
The streamlined certification is made under penalties of perjury, and it is only for non-willful conduct. If accounts were deliberately kept from the IRS, the IRS points taxpayers to the IRS Criminal Investigation Voluntary Disclosure Practice and tells them to consult their professional or legal advisers. We will tell you plainly at the first meeting if we think your facts belong in that conversation rather than this one.
Choosing between late filing and streamlined
When all income was reported, route one is the path: the streamlined domestic procedures are only for people who left income from a foreign asset off their returns. When income was left off, late FBARs alone do not fix it, because the returns have to be amended too. Then the comparison is between two routes. Amending with late FBARs and reasonable cause statements leaves accuracy-related, information return and FBAR penalties possible, and the IRS says information return penalties may be assessed during processing before a reasonable cause statement is considered. The streamlined terms replace all three with the 5% penalty for US residents, and with no penalty for those who qualify as living abroad. That choice depends on your balances, the years involved and the strength of your reasonable cause. We work through both before anything is filed. One caution: amending returns quietly, outside any procedure, does not erase penalties already assessed, and the IRS will not abate them if you later enter the streamlined procedures.
If you do not have a Social Security number
Streamlined submissions need a valid taxpayer identification number. If you are not eligible for a Social Security number and do not yet have an ITIN, the IRS allows the submission to go in with a complete ITIN application. As a Certified Acceptance Agent office, we prepare the ITIN application and the streamlined package together, so one does not hold up the other.
Where to start
Gather a statement for each foreign account showing its highest balance in each of the last six years, and your filed returns for the last three. Our FBAR penalties guide explains what is at stake, and our FBAR filing requirements guide confirms which accounts count. Then let us look at it: our FBAR and FATCA compliance service handles late filings and streamlined submissions from our Naperville office for clients across the country, and a No-Obligation Tax Resolution Case Evaluation is where we compare the routes against your numbers.