Accorda

accord · n. a treaty between jurisdictions; harmony — in French and English alike

US tax clarity for Americans abroad. Private by architecture. An iOS app that tells US expats which filings apply to them — with the regulation cited on every finding — and hands their CPA a ready-made package. Financial data never leaves the phone.

The problem

America taxes by citizenship. Almost nobody abroad knows the rules.

Ordinary foreign savings products — a French Livret A, PEA, or Assurance Vie — trigger up to four overlapping US disclosure regimes (FBAR, Form 8938, Form 8621, Forms 3520/3520-A) before a single euro of US-taxable income is earned. Most of the estimated 5.5M Americans abroad stumble onto this in a panic, after years of innocent non-compliance. At that moment their options are a $1,500+ specialist engagement, cloud tax software that demands their financial data, or Reddit.

5.5M

Americans abroad — untracked by their own government

AARO est., Oct 2024

$16,536

Max civil penalty for one non-willful unfiled FBAR

31 U.S.C. §5321 · FinCEN, 2026

15K/yr

New American arrivals in France alone, +14% YoY

French Interior Ministry, 2025

The product

Interview → cited findings → CPA-ready package.

A guided interview built around real French products feeds a deterministic, versioned rules engine that applies published IRS/FinCEN thresholds — same inputs, same answer, every time, with the citation on every finding. Unsettled questions (is an Assurance Vie a foreign trust?) are only ever flagged for a professional, never decided. One export produces everything a CPA needs: six years of FBAR data, PFIC exposure ranges, and streamlined-procedure worksheets.

The moat is architectural, not claimed: the app makes zero network requests (the permitted-endpoint list ships empty; the App Store privacy label is "nothing collected"), data sits in an AES-256 vault with cryptographic erase, and the AI layer structurally cannot influence a determination. As of July 2026, no product in the category runs on-device, and none sells obligations-determination as a product — it exists only inside paid filings and $250–280 lead-gen consult calls.

Business model

Priced against a worse alternative at every step.

$79 · one-time "Where do I stand?" — full cited determination at the panic moment, vs. a $280 consult call.

$249 · one-time CPA package at handoff, vs. the $1,450–1,890 firms charge to assemble the same data.

B2B · recurring CPA partner network — referral fees for prepared clients; package-import tooling. The channel inherits the client and pays for the introduction.

$59/yr · optional DIY checkup for the cohort that stays CPA-less. Honest retention, not assumed retention.

France is the beachhead (110–153K Americans, dense product traps, CPA scarcity). The engine is corridor-shaped — rules are code, country products and thresholds are versioned data — so the UK, Canada, or Germany are data packs, not rewrites.

Status & ask

Phase 1 is not a plan. It's running.

Working app today: interview → cited findings → CPA package, fully offline, golden-pinned rules engine, 75 tests. Raising $500K pre-seed for an 18-month plan: tax-counsel verification of every rule and threshold, document import with on-device AI (Apple Foundation Models), France TestFlight beta and App Store launch — to 1,500 paid determinations, 400 CPA packages, and 10 founding CPA partners.

deterministic & cited 0 network calls 75 tests passing no servers, near-zero COGS demo on request

Founder

Harvey McGoohan — fintech veteran turned founder, building privacy-first, on-device AI for cross-border financial compliance. Designed and shipped Phase 1 solo: rules engine, encrypted store, interview system, and CPA export.

Accorda is an educational and organizational tool — not a tax preparer, law firm, or financial advisor, and nothing it shows is tax, legal, or financial advice. Determinations are estimates with citations for verification by a qualified professional.