If the money is wired into his account from his mom in Vietnam, then he’s got no problem. His mom is in Vietnam, therefore the gifting limit of $12K annually doesn’t apply to her. If the money is in cash – that is, she somehow managed to end up with a bunch of cash from selling that house in Vietnam (which would be pretty weird, by the way) – then he should go to a big bank – like Wells, BofA, etc. – and deposit the cash into an account there. But he should bring any paperwork with him regarding sale of the house because the bank will want to see it. Now, even if he brings this paperwork, the bank is going to file a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) on this transaction. But… big banks file thousands of SARs every day. So, the likelihood of any single SAR leading to an audit of any kind is extremely low because there aren’t enough folks monitoring SARs to get to even 1% of them. Which is why laundering money is not that difficult, particularly through a large bank that’s filing thousands of SARs around the country every day. Whatever your friend does, he should NOT go to a small bank to handle this transaction. Small banks don’t file many SARs and this transaction would probably get flagged by regulators during an exam.
Now, if the mom who sold the house in Vietnam is a US citizen, then she can only gift him (or anyone else) $12K/year. So, if the mom is a US citizen, none of this is going to work. Same goes for the sister and brother – they can each gift him $12K/year. The bottom line is that the maximum that any US citizen can gift to another citizen is $12K/year before triggering tax consequences for the person paying out the gift. Although, I think there’s an exception for large one-time gifts that would later be offset against the gifter’s estate for tax purposes… I think it’s called something like a one-time unified gift or something like that. But I ain’t a tax perfeshnul, so don’t take anything in this last paragraph to seriously without talking to a real perfushnul.
