Page:Bittner v. United States.pdf/26

6 form, he could have instructed citizens to report each account on a separate form. And if the Secretary had taken that route, Bittner would be hard pressed to deny that he would have violated the statute 272 times by failing to file 272 forms. That difficulty illustrates Bittner’s fundamental misunderstanding of the account-specific obligation imposed by §5314, which is indifferent to the mechanism by which the obligation is discharged.

In the end, “the applicable statute and regulations make clear that any failure to report a foreign account is an independent violation, subject to independent penalties.” Boyd, 991 F. 3d, at 1089 (Ikuta, J., dissenting). A person who fails to report multiple foreign accounts on a single annual form violates the BSA and its implementing regulations multiple times, not just once. So the Government was within its rights to assess a separate penalty against Bittner for each qualifying foreign account that he failed to report properly.

The Court reads the relevant provisions differently. It reasons that the legal duty imposed by §5314 is “the duty to file reports.” In the Court’s view, that “statutory obligation is binary”: “Either one files a report ‘in the way and to the extent the Secretary prescribes,’ or one does not.”  So penalties for nonwillful violations must “accrue on a per-report, not a per-account, basis.”  And because Bittner failed to file timely FBARs for five years, the Court concludes that he violated the law only five times.

The Court’s core error is to conflate the reports referred to in §5314 with the annual FBAR form. To reiterate, the two are distinct. And because the FBAR is not itself the statutorily required “report,” the Court’s conclusion—that Bittner violated §5314 just five times because he untimely filed five FBAR forms—does not follow. The BSA and its