This email was sent on 1/25/2024 to all business clients of Fox Peterson.

Happy New Year and we hope 2024 will be a great year for you. With another new year comes another requirement from the government. Starting this year, pretty much every small business will have to file a new report to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”), which is part of the U.S. Treasury. They are attempting to curb money laundering by requiring business and owner information to be gathered into a large database. If you have an LLC, corporation, partnership, etc. that is legally formed with Arizona (or any other state in the US) then you will likely need to file. This includes LLCs formed to hold real estate that don’t file their own tax return.

For businesses formed before this year, the due date to file this form is December 31, 2024 (end of this year). For businesses formed during 2024 you must file this form within 90 days of formation. There are extremely high penalties for not submitting this form. If you don’t file on time, you could face a fine of up to a $500 per day penalty and/or criminal liability including a fine of $10,000 and/or up to 2 years in prison.

I’m sure you have lots of questions so we have included the attached letter that should help answer most of your questions. We recommend that you do not file this form until later in the year. This whole thing is brand new and there has not been public discussion or feedback until a few weeks ago. We believe that there could be minor changes and feel it would be best to just wait and file later once we have more answers. If you file now and there are changes, you will have to refile.

We wanted to send this now, so you are aware of the requirement. We can file these for you, but we will not do them until later in the year once we have more information. We will communicate in the future when we feel it is a good time to file and let you know how we can assist. We will not be preparing these during tax season except for newly formed businesses that have to do it within 90 days. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Fox Peterson Team

Phone: (480) 898-7640 | Fax: (480) 898-7315      

705 N. Lindsay Road, Mesa, AZ 85213