Short answer: the platform does not change what Schedule FA needs. Fidelity, Schwab, Morgan Stanley at Work and E*TRADE all hold the same five figures under different report names. What decides whether the disclosure is right is the period you pull them for, and three errors that have nothing to do with which platform you use.
The E*TRADE walkthrough is here. This is the version for everyone else.
Before anything: the period
Schedule FA is reported for the calendar year — 1 January to 31 December — because that is the accounting period of the foreign entity. The rest of your return runs 1 April to 31 March.
Every report below should be pulled for the calendar year. Getting this wrong is the most common error on MNC returns, and it invalidates every figure that follows it.
The five reports, whatever they are called
Platforms use their own names, and those names change. What you are looking for is:
| What you need | What it gives you |
|---|
| Vesting / release report | Every vest event: date, share count, fair market value at vest |
| Dividend statement | Gross dividends, and tax withheld abroad |
| Form 1042-S | The US statement of income paid to a foreign person, and tax withheld |
| Realised gain-loss report | Sales: dates, proceeds, cost basis — only if you sold |
| Account / holdings statement | Account details, and the period values the peak is read from |
If a report is not obvious in the interface, the plan administrator or your employer's stock plan team can produce it. That route is usually faster than hunting, and it is the only route once an account has been closed or migrated.
What Schedule FA actually asks for
Four blocks, and the reports above fill all of them:
- The account itself — institution name and address, account number, date opened, peak value during the period, closing balance.
- Each holding — entity name and address, date of acquisition, initial value, peak value, closing value.
- Income — gross dividends, and tax withheld abroad.
- Sale proceeds, where you sold during the period.
The three errors, on every platform
Grant date instead of vest date. The date of acquisition is the date the shares vested and became yours — not the date they were granted. Every platform shows both, usually adjacent, and they are easy to transpose. The initial value follows the same rule: it is the fair market value at vesting, the figure already taxed as a salary perquisite, and it later becomes your cost of acquisition when you sell.
Year-end value instead of peak value. They are separate fields for a reason. The peak is the highest value during the period, read off the period statements — not the 31 December snapshot. If your peak and closing figures are identical on every line, the working is wrong.
Reporting the shares and forgetting the account. The brokerage account is itself a reportable foreign account, with its own peak and closing balance. Disclosing the holdings and omitting the account is a very common omission and an entirely avoidable one.
The worksheet
The peak value is the figure that takes the time, because it has to be assembled from month-end statements rather than read off a single page. The worksheet below does that working — enter the month-end values and it computes the peak and the closing figure for the account and for each holding, alongside the account and holdings tables and a pre-filing checklist.
If a year was missed
The exposure sits under the Black Money Act, not only the Income-tax Act, and it is not proportionate to the tax involved — which is precisely why it is worth dealing with rather than leaving.
It is also not permanent. For a recent year, the revised return window may still be open — see missed Schedule FA. For years further back, FAST-DS 2026 runs until 31 December 2026 and settles undisclosed foreign holdings on materially better terms than the Black Money Act charges.
What does not work is starting to disclose from the current year and leaving the earlier ones unaddressed.
The credit that runs alongside
Where tax was withheld on your dividends, that is claimed separately — not in the return itself, and on a different period basis. See claiming foreign tax credit, which also covers the change from Form 67 to Form 44.
This is a working reference. Platform report names change; what does not change is the period, the fields, and the three errors above.