IRS Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures Page Removed: What Late Filers Should Know

U.S. persons with foreign financial accounts generally must file an FBAR if the aggregate value of those accounts exceeds $10,000 at any time during the calendar year. The FBAR filing and penalty regime arises under the Bank Secrecy Act — 31 U.S.C. § 5314, 31 C.F.R. § 1010.350, and 31 U.S.C. § 5321 for penalties — administered by FinCEN and, by delegation, the IRS. For taxpayers who discover they missed one or more FBAR filings, the choice of how to come back into compliance is important, and a recent change on the IRS website makes that choice less certain than it used to be.

As of June 30, 2026, the IRS’s dedicated Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures page — long found at irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/delinquent-fbar-submission-procedures — returns a “Page Not Found” error. This is significant because the prior version of that page stated that the IRS “will not impose a penalty for the failure to file the delinquent FBARs” for taxpayers who properly reported and paid tax on all income from their foreign accounts, are not under civil examination or criminal investigation, and have not already been contacted by the IRS about the delinquent FBARs. That specific assurance is no longer available at the known IRS webpage.

The change also appears against the backdrop of revisions to the IRS’s broader page, “Options available for U.S. taxpayers with undisclosed foreign financial assets,” updated June 30, 2026. That page now lists three compliance paths: the Criminal Investigation Voluntary Disclosure Practice, the Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures, and the Delinquent International Information Return Submission Procedures. A version of that page available earlier in 2026 listed a fourth option: Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures.

Taken together, these changes raise a real question about whether the IRS intends to continue offering the same clearly stated no-penalty path for taxpayers whose only issue is a missed FBAR and whose foreign account income was properly reported. It is possible that the IRS may clarify the issue, republish the page elsewhere, or otherwise address delinquent FBARs through other guidance. But as of this writing, taxpayers should not assume that the prior IRS webpage assurance remains available on the same clear terms.

For taxpayers, the practical takeaway is now more urgent than before: a late FBAR filing should not be treated as a routine administrative cleanup. The previously well-known path of filing delinquent FBARs with an explanatory statement no longer appears to be supported by the same public IRS webpage assurance that penalties will not be imposed for qualifying taxpayers.

Erik Lincoln is a founding member of Lincoln. In addition to being an attorney he is also a CPA. Erik has consistently been recognized as one of the top attorneys in North Carolina, by Business North Carolina.