Willful FBAR Penalties: Appellate Update April 2025 by Melissa Briggs
Posted by Hochman Salkin Toscher Perez P.C. 
Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2025
Attorneys from our firm have written extensively about foreign bank account reporting (FBAR) penalties.[1] Fifteen years ago, Steven Toscher and Barbara Lubin raised the specter that willful FBAR penalties could violate the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause in the article When Penalties Are Excessive—The Excessive Fines Clause as a Limitation on the Imposition of the Willful FBAR Penalty in the Journal of Tax Practice & Procedure, December 2009–January 2010. Since then, our firm attorneys have updated their scholarship as litigants invoked the Eighth Amendment and courts began to grapple with the issue. See Steven Toscher and Michel R. Stein, The Eighth Amendment Limits on FBAR Penalties—Common Sense Limitations Becomes a Legal Reality, J. Tax Practice & Procedure, June–July 2018. This blog post does not seek to comprehensively cover the Excessive Fines Clause landscape as those articles did. Rather, this blog post seeks to supplement that scholarship and provide a snapshot update of appellate caselaw as of April 2025.
For more information, please contact Melissa Briggs at briggs@taxlitigator.com
