I was born in the US but left as a child — do I owe US taxes?
You have been inside the US tax system since birth, whether or not anyone ever told you so, and the system does not treat leaving as a child as an exception. But owing tax and having to file are two different things. Once foreign tax on the same income is credited, many people in this position turn out to owe little or nothing at all. What they do have is a filing history with nothing in it, and the exposure attaches to the missing filings rather than to unpaid tax. That asymmetry — real exposure, no tax — is the whole reason the catch-up routes exist.
What do I actually have to file to become compliant?
A limited number of back years of returns, together with reports of the financial accounts you hold outside the United States for those years. Which years, and which reports, follows from the route you use, and the route depends on whether the failure to file was non-willful and on where you live. So the position is established first and the filing set is derived from it. Filing more years than the route requires is not a virtue, and filing fewer breaks it. The package also has to go in as a package, because the relief attaches to the whole submission rather than to each individual return in it.
Will I be penalised for never having filed a US return?
Not necessarily, and that is the point of the programmes: they were written for exactly this person. Penalty exposure in these files attaches to unfiled returns and unfiled account reports, which is why the theoretical figure can be large while the tax owed is nil. A submission made correctly under a relief route for a non-willful failure can bring a person current without that penalty being imposed. What creates real risk is not the years of silence but the manner of breaking it: an ordinary late filing, made on its own, invites the penalty regime it could have avoided.
Does it matter which country I live in when I catch up?
Yes. The route available to you depends both on whether the failure was non-willful and on where you live, so residence is not background detail — it is one of the two facts that decide the whole shape of the submission. It affects which years are in scope, what has to be said about the reason for the gap, and what the relief actually removes. This is why we establish residence for each missed year before deciding anything else, and why a person who has moved between countries over the period needs a dated record of where they were living and when.
Can I just file the last few years myself and be done with it?
That is the one approach that reliably makes things worse. Filed in the wrong order, an ordinary late return can close a relief route off before it has been claimed — the route is for people who come to it, and a person who has already filed conventionally may no longer be able to. It is also common for a self-prepared catch-up to miss the account reporting entirely, which is where the exposure sits. The correct order is: establish the facts, choose the route, then prepare the years and the reports the route calls for and submit them together.
Do I have to renounce US citizenship to stop filing?
Renouncing is a separate act with its own consequences, and it is not a way of dealing with years already missed — the obligations for those years remain whatever you do about the passport afterwards. In practice the order runs the other way: getting current is what makes renunciation a real option rather than a hope, because the exit route looks at your filing history. Plenty of people who come to us intending to renounce find, once the back years are computed and foreign tax is credited, that the annual obligation is smaller than they feared and the decision is no longer urgent.
How do I file US taxes when I am married to a foreign spouse?
Three routes. File separately, listing your spouse as a non-resident alien — which needs either an identification number for them or the accepted notation where none exists. Elect to treat them as a resident and file jointly, gaining the joint brackets and accepting their worldwide income. Or file as head of household if you have a qualifying dependant, which some Americans abroad can do while married. The right answer turns on their income and their assets. See a US person with a non-resident spouse.
What is the US exit tax?
A charge that applies when a US citizen renounces or a long-term permanent resident gives up their status and meets one of the covered-expatriate tests — an income test, a net-worth test, or a failure to certify five years of compliance. A covered expatriate is treated as having sold worldwide assets on the day before expatriation, and Form 8854 is what reports the position. The tests turn on figures that are indexed, so they are read for the year of expatriation. See Form 8854.
