👋 About FIRPTArefunds
FIRPTArefunds is a specialized practice helping Foreign Sellers, Buyers & Closing Professionals navigate FIRPTA withholding, tax filings, refund recovery, ITINs, and complex FIRPTA situations.
The firm is founded and personally led by Richard Kahn, whose exposure to FIRPTA dates to its enactment in 1980. At the time, Richard was a National Product Manager with Merrill Lynch, where Chairman and CEO Donald Regan — later U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan — discussed the new FIRPTA legislation with members of the firm.
Richard has followed FIRPTA’s evolution from its beginning through the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 (DRA), which added the mandatory 10% withholding provisions under IRC §1445 and gave the law its enforcement teeth. Later, the PATH Act of 2015, signed into law by President Barack Obama, increased the general FIRPTA withholding rate to 15% and made significant statutory changes to the ITIN program and Certified Acceptance Agent framework.
Today, Richard is an IRS AFSP FIRPTA TaxPro and IRS Certified Acceptance Agent (CAA), assisting foreign national sellers of U.S. properties, buyers, and closing professionals with FIRPTA withholding, tax filings, refund recovery, ITIN services, and related requirements.
Experience Behind the Practice
Richard’s broader career has included financial markets on and off Wall Street, real estate development and brokerage, mortgage lending, accounting and financial advisory, forensic accounting, and complex financial problem-solving. He spent nearly 20 years as Tax Matters Partner for approximately 60 entities and has provided forensic research, analysis, and reporting in more than 1,000 cases nationwide, including expert testimony in Federal and dozens of U.S. State Courts.
Through this work, FIRPTA developed into a substantial standalone specialty. When a foreign person sells U.S. real property, FIRPTA generally requires the buyer to withhold a portion of the amount realized and remit it to the IRS. The foreign seller must then address the related U.S. tax filing requirements and, when appropriate, claim a refund of excess withholding.
Over the years, the many functions surrounding that process — withholding, withholding certificates, tax filings, ITINs, refund recovery, compliance, and problem resolution — led to the development of the 17 products and services FIRPTArefunds offers today.
FIRPTArefunds began as a specialized division of FPG-USA (Forensic Professionals Group USA), established in 2008, and continues today as an affiliated specialty practice, having served many hundreds of FIRPTA project-based clients over the years.
A Deliberately Specialized Practice
FIRPTArefunds is not a high-volume tax preparation operation.
Richard maintains a deliberately specialized practice and remains personally involved in client matters. Clients engage FIRPTArefunds for a specific issue, service, or series of related matters, with the scope and fees established in advance.
Some matters are straightforward. Others arrive with substantial funds already withheld, missing or incorrect filings, ITIN problems, entity structures, withholding questions, prior-year issues, or circumstances that simply do not fit neatly into the usual process.
That is where Richard’s broader experience becomes particularly useful. FIRPTA may be a specialized area of tax law, but the problems surrounding a transaction can cross accounting, tax, real estate, financial, and procedural lines.
The objective is straightforward: understand what happened, determine what needs to be done, and help move the matter toward resolution.
We serve Foreign Sellers, Buyers & Closing Professionals throughout the United States and internationally through a long-established remote-service model.
Sharing What We’ve Learned
Richard regularly publishes articles for FIRPTArefunds based on practical issues encountered by Foreign Sellers, Buyers & Closing Professionals. The objective is to make a complicated area of U.S. tax law easier to understand and help people recognize potential issues before they become expensive problems.
Perhaps We Can Help
You may be a Foreign Seller trying to recover substantial funds already sent to the IRS, determine whether withholding can be reduced before closing, obtain an ITIN, or straighten out a filing problem.
You may be a Buyer trying to determine whether FIRPTA applies and what you are required to do.
Or you may be a Closing Professional who simply wants to provide the information needed for Forms 8288 and 8288-A while having a tax preparer review and sign off for risk mitigation, or you may have a more complicated set of issues you want a FIRPTA TaxPro to evaluate and opine on because the transaction does not fit neatly into the usual process.
You don't need to understand FIRPTA or diagnose the problem before contacting us.
Tell us what's happening. Perhaps we can help.
📩 RKahn@FPG-USA.com
🌐 www.FIRPTArefunds.com
🌐 www.FPG-USA.com