Form 3520 (Annual Return To Report Transactions With Foreign Trusts
and Receipt of Certain Foreign Gifts) is only required to be filed if
you were a United States taxpayer (citizen or resident alien) and recipient of a gift(s) from a foreign national(s) in annual
excess of $100,000, or if you were such a person and the owner of a foreign trust account
or entity, or had financial interactions with such a foreign trust.
It
does not apply to any other foreign bank or financial accounts, or to
the many other circumstances that a US taxpayer may have, or encounter,
with overseas financial transactions. It also does not apply to nonresident aliens.
You are very welcome to confirm these facts, for yourself, by reading Pages 1 and 2 of the Form 3520
instructions. A courtesy link to that document is provided below for
reference:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i3520.pdf
Form 3520 is not included in TurboTax, but can be downloaded from the internet, completed by hand using pen or pencil, and then separately mailed to the IRS. It does not have to be included with the rest of your tax return.
Now then, assuming that you
own a bank account or maintain other financial assets in a foreign country
(this could include your foreign gift money, or not, or some other money entirely), there are certain foreign
financial account reporting requirements that you must meet annually, in
addition to filing a primary tax return (Form 1040, etc.)
In fact, there are two
separate disclosure forms that may be required; each also has different
reporting rules. One is known as IRS Form 8938, and can be
attached to the relevant yearly Form 1040 tax return. The other is FinCen
Form 114, which can only be filed via the internet. The following Internal
Revenue Service webpage describes them in some detail, and provides their
dollar value reporting levels:
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/comparison-of-form-8938-and-fbar-requirements
Form 8938 is included in
TurboTax. FinCen Form 114 is not included in TurboTax, and you would need
to access that reporting webpage separately, if your foreign financial assets
total over the limit(s). Note that you can get to the FinCen reporting
internet site directly through the above IRS link.
Please note as well that if you are filing IRS Form 8938 to disclose a foreign financial account in a given year, then you don't need to also file IRS Form 3520 as well, to additionally report that same amount held in a foreign account. (But these same rules of "unnecessary" duplicative tax reporting do not similarly apply to IRS Form 8938 and FinCen Form 114.)
Thank you for asking this important question.
