Non-Resident Aliens couple with foreign investment income

[Aarkay Rao]

What are the forms and methods for filing tax returns jointly for a green card holder couple with major income from foreign Fund investments (capital gains and dividends) and bank deposits?  Does Lacerte Tax program take care of this?  If yes, is there any demo available?

[BobKamman]

Most green-card holders (maybe all of them) are resident aliens.  Are there some special circumstances here?  Do you mean they have green cards but are living outside the country?

[itonewbie · Accepted solution]

Agree with Bob.

No, Lacerte does not "take care of" any of these for you but it is capable of handling international returns (much better than many of the different tax products out there).

Big Four use GoRs and ProSystems for international returns.  Both have all the sophistication you need for complex international returns but neither "takes care of" anything for you - it all depends on you understanding the tax law, deciding on the appropriate tax position to take, and making the right input so that the tax logic built into the programs will prepare the returns correctly for you.

Lacerte is not as comprehensive as either GoRs or ProSystems but is more than sufficient to manage relatively complex and international returns.

[itonewbie]

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@Aarkay Rao wrote:

If yes, is there any demo available?

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Yes, there is: https://proconnect.intuit.com/tax/lacerte/eval/

[Aarkay Rao]

We are residents' aliens and residing in US.  But all our incomes are investments in funds (dividend and capital gain) which would require PFICs and FBAR filling.  My question is whether Lacerte would take care of filling PFIC and FBAR details.

[itonewbie]

@Aarkay Rao This forum is open only to tax professionals.  For consumer questions, you should visit the TurboTax Community instead: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/file-with-turbotax/discussion/03/303

For those who wonder, Lacerte/PTO require offline computations and quite a bit of manual input for PFIC (which, btw, is not unusual).