Originally Posted by tht

it is very hard to get anyone on the phone from the IRS and even harder to get any useful information from them. Even when I was filing tax’s in both the US and UK for a few years the top tier of turbo tax had all the forms I needed, you can likely get a away with a lower tier. Also remember that US tax year is 1 Jan to 31 Dec, and UK is 6th April to the following 5th April, so you need to make sure to apportion UK income (on a cash basis) in the the right US tax years. So you need to keep really accurate records. Bank statements are important vs just pay slips, because payments can take time to credit.

The FBAR is filed directly and is very simple once you understand it, no calculation, the one point to note is that you have to file the highest balance in each account for the year, so for example if you have $20k in account A in March and transfer it to account B in April you have to report a high balance of $20k in both accounts (so it looks like you have $40k) even though you only have $20k.

the link to file with the US Treasury is here