@pk - thank you so much for your guidance.
Just to clarify my situation:
- both my husband and I are US Green Card holders
- the only assets we have outside of the US are these bank accounts in Japan.
- As far as we know, US doesn't know the existence of our bank accounts in Japan yet, because we haven't told the Japanese banks that we live in the US. Our guess is US/IRS would not know about them until we either file either Form 8938/FBAR or make some sort of transactions from/to the bank to our US bank accounts.
To answer your question, we only recently found out about these Japanese bank accounts. My husband found out, when his grandmother passed away and discovered that she had opened an account for him years ago. We've seen the question in TurboTax since, but initially it didn't occur to us that this Japanese account would have direct impact on the US tax filing process - we totally missed it a couple of times (just repeated same response from previous years). Over the last year, we finally learned that we were/are required to report the account, and upon finding that out, I also checked with family to see if there's a similar account under my name in similar situation and did find one. Now we are aware of the existence of the accounts AND the requirements, totally panicking...!
Your response is extremely helpful. Do you feel any part of your suggestion may change based on the fact that IRS likely does not know the existence of these account, i.e., the Japanese banks not aware that we are US persons at the moment?
Thank you so much again for your assistance.
