Taxable Talk

You’re looking at the headline and wondering what I’m drinking. There’s no May 29th tax deadline, right? Well, yes, that’s correct; however, there is a May 29th government filing deadline that will impact some business owners.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis surveys all US owners of foreign (non-US) entities every five years. Via Jack Townsend’s Federal Tax Crimes blog is the news that the BEA survey is due as soon as this Friday, May 29th! He links to a report from Joseph Perera and Farley P. Katz titled, “Alert: Benchmark Survey of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad (BE-10 Report) Due May 29, 2015. This begins,

All U.S. persons that owned, directly or indirectly, 10% or more of the voting stock of a foreign corporation, or an equivalent interest in an unincorporated foreign business enterprise (e.g. a partnership), at any time during the 2014 fiscal year, are required to file a BE-10 Report.

There are both civil and criminal penalties if you ignore this.

Humorously, when I tried to access the BEA web site for forms I got a “Server Not Found” error. The reason? The BEA website only works if you do not put “www.” before the bea.

Here is the correct link to the forms. Note that the links given in Jack Townsend’s article and the article by Perera and Katz may not work but if you remove the “www” (so that they begin “http://bea…”) they should work.

Even more humorous, when the BEA emailed me the verification link to confirm my efiling, they included “www” in their link. I had to remove that to get the verification link to work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2015 at 3:03 pm and is filed under BEA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.