My U.S. controller can move money from our foreign account but does not own it. Is that the kind of FBAR issue people miss?
I live in Germany and own a U.S. LLC with a foreign currency account overseas. We recently hired a U.S.-based controller who has online access and the ability to approve certain payments, but he does not own the account and is not an equity holder. I had been thinking about FBAR mainly as an ownership test, not an access test.
Now I am worried that I oversimplified the rule. I want to know whether this kind of signature or payment authority is the exact reason FinCEN talks about authority separately from financial interest, and how founders should document account access inside the company.
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