No. 7457 form… why they need to know this?

6 comments

1. Maybe because you’re rich and they want to see if you do laundry

2. If you’re making enough/have enough assets to be required to submit that, just shut up and pay your accountant to do it for you. The government has a right to know your property assets for taxation, liability purposes, and prevention of money laundering. This is not something specific to Japan.

3. There seems to be a lot of focus these days in high-wealth people trying to hide assets from inheritance tax obligations, which are quite high in Japan. Maybe that’s a factor.

4. They seem to be cracking down on overseas money laundering recently. Not sure why. Russia maybe? Absolute pain in the arse. Not because I launder money, but because every few weeks I seem to have another load of paperwork to fill in, which was pretty much identical to the previous lot.

5. I know for a fact that the NTA randomly sends this for people with asset above X JPY and requires 100% of people with Y JPY (not going to reveal the X and Y number here), the same goes for tax auditing.

   Basically speaking, they think you’re rich enough to be on those X/Y level.

6. It’s so you can’t hide future income from taxes (though, they’ll say it’s to track down money laundering). My tax guy (he does both my Japanese and USA taxes) has for the last few years said that this is a serious thing.

   If you have foreign assets and some day transfer the money to Japan, you may have the tax authorities show up five years later to ask you about it. Source: happened to me. (Luckily, I had done everything accurately and honestly by the book. Unlucky for me is that the instructions printed by the Japan tax authority were wrong, and I got fucked.)