It’s a gloomy day here.

More ways than one.

I filed the IRS Form

Report of Foreign Bank

and Financial Accounts (FBAR)

(note how similar the acronym is to F.U.B.A.R.?)

This is one of those forms that little guys (yo!) have to file because the big drug pushing money launderers and gigantic corporations want to keep dollars in banks outside the U.S. to hide it from the IRS.

The biggies have huge staffs of nerds to file these documents to keep them within the law. (Think Mitt.)

That may have caused some with foreign accounts not to step forward. Some tax cases imply that you might not be willful if you have a genuine misunderstanding of the tax law even if it’s unreasonable.

Even at that, a fair number of the biggies just ignore the law.

I don’t have a staff. I misunderstand a lot! But the courts don’t care, so onward.

It took me an two hours to read the documents, fill them out and file.

I had many false starts.  Biggest was that just as I was ready to print the form to mail, I saw the eFile option.

Restart.

In order to eFile, a secure connection had to be established. They required the toughest password you can think of:

In the first eight characters (but no more than 15):

• 1 upper case letter
• 1 lower case letter
• 1 number
• one special character (they wouldn’t accept 🙂 as a special character!)

It took me at least a dozen tries before I could get a password that would be accepted. Of course I stumbled a few times trying to type it twice.

Pffbt.

But it’s done.

Accepted.

I hope the FUBAR form is the right one and not Form 8938.

Pretty sure I’m right. “Pretty sure” is acceptable to the I.R.S.

Amiright?