Avoid the scrutiny of FATCA/FBAR/Form 8938 by putting your gold in an offshore safety deposit box

Cross posted from the Isaac Brock Society.

Simon Black (Do I Have To Report My Offshore Gold…?) asks whether custodial gold “accounts” (e.g., James Turk’s Gold Money) fall under FATCA provisions and his people think so. However, gold kept in a safety deposit box would not fall under FATCA:



This is good news for “structuralists” like myself. In a discussion with Just Me, I learned that my suggestion of opening a few extra accounts to get one’s total over 25 (thus avoiding a detailed FBAR) could be “structuring”. Structuring is the practice of breaking up a single large transactions into multiple transactions below the reporting threshold. See what happened to this Greek American couple: My Big FAT IRS case. A US Person in Canada could withdraw funds from their FATCA covered account, until it is below $50,000, and then buy legal tender gold coins (Maple Leaf). These coins would go into safe storage–meaning it would be safe from burglers and from the snooping noses of the IRS, for such coins would not be reportable under FATCA, FBAR, or Form 8938. But almost certainly, it would be a violation of United States law for you or me to exercise our Canadian freedom to buy legal tender coins minted by the Royal Canadian Mint and legally purchased in a legitimate Canadian business, providing all kinds of jobs to Canadians. You would become a structuralist.

For those readers in Canada, I suggest that you take few seconds and take a deep breath. Breath in that Canadian air. Isn’t that good? That’s because you are breathing freedom–freedom from the tyranny of the United States.

Bear in mind also the ramifications of these legal tender coins for Form 8854. The current retail buy price of the Maple gold (1 oz of super fine gold, purity of 0.9999) is about $1650 (See Canadian PMX in the Toronto Area), but its face value under legal tender laws is $50 CDN. So let me ask the question: when reporting on Form 8854, does one report the legal tender value or the intrinsic value of legal tender coins? If you had ten million US quarters, you would have to report their face value on Form 8854 (US $2.5 million). It would be illegal to report only the intrinsic value of the coins (ca. $500,000). This is because the US quarter is a legal tender coin and its reportable value is what is marked on the coin. So therefore, if you have 6,000 Gold Maple Leaf coins, you would be required to report CDN $300,000 on Form 8854. Accuse me of being a structuralist vis-a-vis United States law. Just do it! But I am obeying the laws of Canada where I live.

There are some people who say that gold is not a good investment, such as the crony capitalist extraordinaire Warren Buffet. Others point to the gold chart and say that this is why gold is a bad investment. Well, I admit that that argument is slightly counter-intuitive.