“In February 2013, an IRS examiner combing over the couple’s return wanted to know whether the wife’s act of submitting a ‘married filing jointly’ Form 1040 had accidentally turned the husband into a U.S. person, even if they had not explicitly made a § 6013(g) election for a nonresident alien spouse to be treated as a resident alien for tax purposes. Such treatment would saddle him with an obligation to file Form 3520 on what the IRS hilariously calls ‘foreign trusts’ and what the husband probably thinks of as ‘my local & fully-tax-compliant retirement account’ — and since the would-be joint return apparently didn’t include any 3520s for him, the couple would have been subject to penalties.”
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