Fines for not filing taxes (I've never filed . . . yet)

[whoops]

Hi,

I was born in the US in the 1960s– my mother was Canadian; my father a resident Alien or American (not sure). We moved to Canada in 1970 and though I got a SSN number when I was about 18, I never worked in the US.

I never filed income taxes having seen something about a limit below which it wasn’t necessary to worry about filing if you lived abroad when I was in my 20s. I also became a dual citizen with Canada when I was about 21.

I have held jobs in Canada but mostly never paid income tax because whatever I owed was cancelled out by deductions. Mostly I got returns of some sort I may have owed income tax up here one or two years. I certainly never made anywhere near the foreign earning exemption.

In 2003 my father died and I became ill. I received - over time -about 90,000 from his estate – not all at once but in ‘chunks’ – I didn’t work much after that because I became ill and so never had much income to report and mostly lived off my inheritance.

I never realized until today that there had been a law change in the US tax system that required people to file or face fines.

I would like to get things in order as I would like to start attempting to sell some digital ebooks on Amazon and start a business with a friend (she’s just Canadian) which will involve selling some things on Amazon as well). Because of this I looked into the tax situation of dual citizens abroad and discovered the situation with the possible fines.

What exactly do I need to do to get this in order. Since I have very little money at the moment – living hand to mouth just trying to start things up – I really don’t want to get into the IRS radar and have some law fine me 10,000 dollars or worse just because I didn’t file as I struggled to get back my health and lived off an inheritance.

What kind of fines are imposed on people if they haven’t filed their back taxes?

Thank you.

[nelsona]

The law has not chnaged. US citisens have ALWAYS been required to report their world income to US, their foreign accounts, etc.There was simply a crack-down.