Do I file Form 8992 for my own one-person company abroad?
Very possibly. This filing is not confined to multinational groups: an individual founder who owns a company abroad can be a US shareholder of a controlled foreign corporation and can have an inclusion to compute. It is the commonest surprise in this area, because the company feels like a personal trading vehicle rather than a foreign subsidiary of anything. The questions to answer are whether the company is controlled by US shareholders, whether you are one of them, and what its profits look like measured against a routine return on its tangible assets. None of those depend on the company's size, or on what you took out of it during the year.
Who counts as a US shareholder for Form 8992?
Ownership and control decide it, not job title or where you live. You are looking at two things: whether the company counts as a controlled foreign corporation by reference to who owns it, and whether your own holding is large enough to make you a shareholder for these rules. Shares held through other entities, and shares attributed from family, can both matter, so the answer is rarely read off the share register alone. Where a company has several owners in different countries the position can change from year to year as holdings move. Map the ownership chain, including anything held in trust or through a holding company, before concluding you are outside it.
Do I file Form 8992 if the company paid me no dividend?
That is exactly the point of these rules, and the answer is yes. The inclusion is deliberately blind to whether cash was distributed. Active foreign profits above a routine return on the company's tangible assets are pulled into your income for the year they are earned, so a founder who left everything in the company to fund growth is taxed on money they have not received. The practical consequence is a cash-flow problem rather than a filing problem: the tax falls due on its own timetable while the profit sits in the company's account abroad. Plan the distribution policy and the payment together, before the year ends rather than after.
My foreign company already pays tax abroad — do I still file?
Usually, yes. Foreign tax paid by the company does not remove the computation, and the reliefs that soften this charge for corporate shareholders are not automatically available to an individual one. That asymmetry is the heart of the problem: two owners of identical businesses can face very different results depending on what holds the shares. There are elections and credit mechanisms that change the picture, but they have to be chosen deliberately and they carry consequences of their own. The work is to compute the inclusion first and then compare the routes available on your own facts, rather than assuming the foreign tax has already dealt with it.
Does Form 8992 apply to a service company with no equipment?
Often more than it does to a company with a warehouse full of machinery, which is counter-intuitive until you see how the charge is built. The inclusion targets profits above a routine return on the company's tangible assets, so a company whose value comes from its people, its software or its client relationships has little of the asset base that shelters income. Consultancies, agencies and software businesses therefore tend to produce larger inclusions than capital-heavy operations earning the same profit. If you run a services company abroad, treat this as a live computation every year rather than as a rule written for manufacturers.
Do I file Form 8992 if I own the company with local partners?
Possibly, and the analysis turns on control rather than on your own percentage in isolation. What matters first is whether US shareholders together hold enough of the company for it to be a controlled foreign corporation, and then whether your own holding is large enough to bring you within the rules. Co-owners who are not US persons affect that arithmetic, so a minority founder in a locally owned business may be outside it while a small group of founders is not. Ownership through holding companies and attribution from family feed into the same test, so the chain needs mapping in full.
How is a GILTI inclusion calculated, in outline?
Start at the foreign company: its tested income or loss for the year, computed under US principles. Aggregate those across all your controlled foreign corporations, net the losses, then reduce by a return on qualifying tangible business assets less certain interest expense. What remains is your inclusion, brought into your own return, where the deduction and any credit are applied. Every one of those percentages has been amended, so the mechanism is stable and the arithmetic is year-specific. See the GILTI inclusion and Form 8992.
Is GILTI computed at the CFC level or the shareholder level?
Both, in sequence. Tested income, tested loss and the qualifying asset base are measured company by company. They are then aggregated at the US shareholder, which is where the netting of losses across companies happens and where the inclusion, the deduction and the credit are determined. That order matters in practice: a loss in one foreign subsidiary can reduce the inclusion caused by another, but only for a shareholder who owns both. See the GILTI inclusion and Form 8992.
