I missed Schedule FA in earlier years, what should I do now?
Start by establishing the facts rather than the remedy: which years you were resident in India, what you held abroad in each of them, and what the returns you filed actually said. Only then does the route become clear, because the options differ depending on how old a year is and whether the department has already taken it up. Correcting your own record before a query arrives is a materially better position than answering one, and the asset schedule is one of the few places where the disclosure failure rather than the tax is the exposure. Get the statements for every year first.
Can I add Schedule FA to a return I have already filed?
Sometimes, and it depends on the age of the year and whether it is already under examination, so that is the first thing to check. Where the year is still open to correction, the cleanest outcome is a corrected return that carries the asset schedule and agrees with the income already reported. Where it is not, the position has to be put by disclosure instead. Either way, deal with the whole run of years at once. A single corrected year sitting in a series of uncorrected ones invites the question of what happened in the others.
The account earned nothing, can a late Schedule FA still be penalised?
Yes, and this is the part that surprises people. The obligation is to disclose the holding, so it is not discharged by there being no income and no tax, and non-disclosure of a foreign asset is treated more severely in Indian tax law than an ordinary understatement of income. A nil account therefore deserves the same care as a substantial one. It is also cheap to put right, because the supporting evidence is a statement showing the balance and there is nothing to compute behind it.
I declared the foreign income but forgot the asset schedule, is that late?
Treat it as a gap, yes. The income pages and the asset schedule answer different questions, and they are read together: income from an account you have not disclosed holding is an obvious inconsistency, as is a disclosed asset that never produces anything. Having declared the income helps you, because it shows nothing was hidden, and it makes the correction largely mechanical. Reconcile the two across every year, then correct them as a set, so the account appears in both from the year you acquired it.
Will filing Schedule FA late bring a query from the department?
It can, and the alternative is worse. Information about accounts held abroad reaches tax administrations from other countries, so an undisclosed holding is not a quiet position, it is an unanswered one. A corrected filing you have prepared, with statements behind every entry and a consistent account across the years, is a query you can answer in a letter. The same query put against a gap nobody has looked at becomes an enquiry into what else was left out. Build the supporting file before you file, not afterwards.
I closed the foreign account before returning to India, must I disclose it?
Look at the year rather than the closing date. If you were resident in India for a year in which you held the account at any point, that year's schedule needed it, and closing the account later does not remove the entry from the year it belonged to. If you closed it while still non-resident, and were never resident while it existed, the position is different. Establish both dates from documents, because this is a question decided by the calendar, and keep the closing statement, which is the evidence that the entries stop.
Do I need to report a foreign business I own?
Almost certainly, and on more than one form. Canada requires reporting of foreign affiliates on the T1134; the United States has a family of returns keyed to the entity type and your level of control, and several carry penalties that apply whether or not any tax is owed. These are information returns, so the obligation follows the ownership rather than the profit. See T1134.
Do I have to declare my dual citizenship?
A tax return does not generally ask you to declare which passports you hold; it asks about residence, and in the US case it applies to citizens by definition. What does ask is your bank. Account-opening self-certification under FATCA and the Common Reporting Standard asks which countries you are a tax resident or citizen of, and the answer is reported onward to the tax authority. So the practical answer is that the information arrives either way. See FATCA reporting.
