Posted on 08/19/2009 5:41:07 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Thousands of Americans who thought they had a secret Swiss bank account will have their names and account details given to the U.S. Internal Revenue Services under an agreement announced Wednesday among U.S. and Swiss authorities and the Swiss bank UBS.
The IRS said Americans would no longer be able to evade taxes so easily by hiding their assets in offshore accounts.
The agreement comes as U.S. tax authorities conduct a criminal investigation into Americans who used Swiss bank accounts at UBS AG to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
The settlement follows demands from the U.S. authorities that the bank hand over details on more than 50,000 customers. According to the settlement, U.S. tax authorities will gain access to 4,450 accounts of Americans who have accounts with UBS, and will drop a lawsuit against UBS in federal court demanding the names.
However, the agency expects to have access to hundreds of additional accounts through other agreements. An IRS official said the total number of names disclosed could be in the "high 5,000s."
"Wealthy Americans who have hidden their money offshore will find themselves in a jam," said IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman. "You can expect us to continue to be aggressive with institutions that are helping Americans avoid taxes."
U.S. authorities are building criminal tax-evasion cases against more than 150 Americans who held accounts with UBS. He added that the accounts considered as part of the settlement held over $18 billion at one point.
'The days of hiding an asset overseas are days that clearly are eroding.'
A U.S. citizen can choose to appeal the case in a Swiss administrative court. The UBS clients are expected to receive notices in the mail in the next few weeks.
It could take months for the information to come to the IRS, an agency official said.
However, Shulman pointed out that the settlement represented a major improvement in the U.S. government's ability to gain access to information about U.S. tax avoiders.
"We started the negotiations at a point when the Swiss government took the position that we could not get access to the information, so we felt we needed to go through a U.S. court process to proceed," Shulman said. "About a month ago that posture changed. The Swiss government came to us and said they wanted to negotiate. Now, the Swiss government has said they have every reason to believe we will get access to these accounts."
Anthony Sabino, professor of law and business at St. John's University in New York, said the agreement represents a "new era in international law enforcement," because for the first time the Swiss government is willing to bend their "ultra-secret" bank secrecy laws.
"If the Swiss government cooperates on UBS, it will cooperate on other Swiss banks," Sabino said. "The pressure has been building against the damn for years, and now you're going to see a flood of information coming out. It is a signal that as capital moves with light speed over national borders, tax agencies and other governmental authorities will not be far behind."
UBS Chairman Kaspar Villiger said in a statement that the settlement helps resolve one of the Swiss bank's most pressing issues.
"I am confident that the agreement will allow the bank to continue moving forward to rebuild its reputation through solid performance and client service," he said.
Hand over the information -- voluntarily
Shulman pointed out that U.S. citizens have until Sept. 23 to voluntarily disclose their tax-avoidance or face "stiffer civil or possible criminal" charges. He added that U.S. citizens with hidden UBS accounts can still voluntarily disclose their account information to U.S. tax authorities before the deadline even if they previously received a notice from the Swiss bank. He added that bank notices will be sent out in stages and many letters may not be received by account holders until after the Sept. 23 voluntary deadline.
"The IRS will receive a significant portion of the account information after the Sept. 23 cutoff," Shulman said.
The accounts have a variety of holdings including precious metals and other securities. Some are off-shore "sham trust accounts," Shulman said.
St. John's University's Sabino pointed out that the voluntary program gives the tax-avoiders amnesty if they agree to a program to pay the back taxes they owe the U.S. government. However, if the tax-avoiders do not voluntarily disclose the information they can face jail time.
"If you don't come clean, the IRS won't be interested in just money, though they'll take that," Sabino said. "They'll be interested in criminal prosecution."
He added that U.S. citizens with undeclared UBS accounts will be "burning up the phone lines" with their expensive tax and white collar crime attorneys.
"If they can figure out some sort of payment scheme with the IRS they'll do that rather than face the possibility of going to jail," Sabino said.
Shahzad Malik, a tax attorney at TroyGould in Los Angeles, said he believes many U.S. residents will start coming forward on their own.
"This is simply unprecedented for an apparent turn-over in names by a Swiss bank," Malik said. "We may see a massive number of U.S. people who will now come forward voluntarily and negotiate a deal before the IRS locates them."
UBS has already handed over details on about 250 customers and paid fines of $780 million. But it has also been facing a further demand from tax authorities that it provide details on 52,000 other U.S. clients who may have been involved in tax evasion.
More banks identified
Shulman said he would not divulge whether the IRS has other investigations open, but the agency is receiving a lot of leads from the agency disclosure program.
"The days of hiding an asset overseas are days that clearly are eroding," Shulman said.
As well as the investigations over UBS, wealthy American citizens who have come forward under a tax-evasion amnesty program have identified other Swiss and European banks where their accounts are held, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Among the banks named in the voluntary disclosures are Credit Suisse Group , Julius Baer Holding and Union Bancaire Privee, the report said.
The disclosures aren't a signal of wrongdoing -- merely that a U.S. citizen keeps money at these banks -- and also don't indicate that other banks mirrored UBS' activities, including creating complex structures to help clients evade taxes, the Journal reported.
You first
This is how you fix it.
Texas and maybe Louisiana secede and the marxists issue orders to bring them back.
The US Military instead rounds up the socialists and puts them on a plane to Cuba.
Provisional military government for 6 months, then new elections for all congressional seats and the WH, incumbents need not apply.
Only tax paying citizens and veterans are enfranchised in the new Republic.
All amendments other than the original bill of rights are repealed.
"Dueling" legalized within Washington DC limits.
Problem solved.
So if I'm traveling overseas and my name comes up on the enemies list they can have me arrested for having nickels in my pocket change?
I’m glad you made the bad guy red, the traditional color of communism. This “Red State” “Blue State” template is the SRM trying to make us forget.
LOL!
Nowadays, who knows!
The Holy O is just following the example of his hero Stalin: shaking down the kulaks and confiscating their property to benefit party apparatchiks and unwashed rabble that supports them.
“You first”
No way. I want to be around for Apocalypse.
I think thats perfect
Maybe in future cabinet nominees. That seems to be where the dim tax cheats gather these days.
But, there will be a couple hundred Republicans.
Then if the inquiries continued,they should have issued international arrest warrants for the agents they are dealing with and their bosses including Timothy Geithner.
Early on, some channels used a scheme of red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. The first television news network to use colors to depict the states won by presidential candidates was NBC.
In 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for the NBC Nightly News, asked his network's engineers to construct a large electronic map of the USA. The map was placed in the network's election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state it would light up in red; if Gerald Ford, the Republican, carried a state it would light up in blue. The feature proved to be so popular that four years later all three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates on Election Night. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years; NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map as showing Ronald Reagan's 44-state landslide as resembling a "suburban swimming pool".[6]
CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme: blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other in 1976. However, in 1980 and 1984, ABC used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. As late as 1996, there was still no universal association of one color with one party.[7] If anything, by 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time Magazine and the Washington Post used an opposite scheme.[8][9][10]
In the days following the protracted 2000 election, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On Election Night that year there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms "red states" and "blue states" entered popular usage in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election. Journalists began to routinely refer to "blue states" and "red states," even before the 2000 election was settled.[citation needed]
After the results were final, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as the December 2001 The Atlantic's cover story by David Brooks entitled, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" illustrated. Thus, red and blue became fixed in the media and in many people's minds,[11] despite the fact that no "official" color choices had been made by the parties.
They can be sold to coin dealers just as you would sell other coins and old jewelry. What happens after that is none of my business. :)
And it wouldn’t hurt to have a few homemade silver bullets on hand with Hillary! still allowed to roam around loose in the world, LOL!
At the very leaset, since I don’t have CC in my state, a few rolls of nickels in the end of a sock leaves a pretty good ‘impression’ upon a thug when you want to protect yourself. :)
>>And it wouldn’t hurt to have a few homemade silver bullets on hand with Hillary! still allowed to roam around loose in the world, LOL!<<
You made me spew coffee this morning! LOLOL!
I need another cuppa. It's rainy and gray and I just want to crawl back into bed...but it's my day off, so I have a lot to do around here.
Have a Great day off!
I don’t have to water my plants today!
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1917829,00.html divorce clients on the trail with UBS, AND
As an aside, of relevance, there are 52,000 accounts at UBS, all the rest should come out too....one can guess why the main body is shielded ...thousands of politicians, etc. as well as the internationally legitimized Swiss tradition of secrecy, unchallenged to date. Note, historically, since WWII, that there are reported now about 280,000 ‘private banks’ in the Carribean, 8-11 members and officers required in each bank varying on the island govt. with jurisdiction, which are ‘neutral banking jurisdictions’, meaning they do not communicate with the Fed Res System and are not in reach of the IRS. None of these ‘banks’ do any public business. They are merely repositories of unreachable funds for private international use. There are more banking charters than maritime ship registrations/flags of convenience!!..tax havens supreme. The US Navy probably exists more to protect these banks than it does our own banks. We should use our Navy to reclaim the assets in these banks, and thereby reclaim the stolen wealth from our country, now that the middle class, in the process of being enslaved, has rapidly diminishing assets to be taxed. Fully 2/3rds of the 280,000 ‘banks’ are owned by Americans?! The so called Obama initiative of ‘tax the rich’, avoids their biggest asset repository, Caribbean private banks, chartered there. The focus on Switzerland, and one bank, with a minimal sampling of tax evaders is only a diversion from the vastly larger international picture of tax evasion. The selection criteria of the 4-5000 being exposed at UBS must be suspect of being diversionary in its’ isolation...and, perhaps Republicans and independants are being focussed on at a lower level? (recall Chrysler dealership rejections) at a lower level? Just kidding, the ‘fairness’ must be ‘beyond compare’. The selection criteria are secret, of course.
Note the software available for running a private bank:
Panama City, Panama (PRWEB) May 28, 2008 — NexorOne (www.nexorone.com) announced Friday that its banking platform will integrate with Eurowire (www.eurowire.cc), allowing customers to pass on international wire instructions and other customer orders directly from the software. Both NexorOne and Eurowire believe the refined system will help ease the process for private and offshore banks, as well as eliminate many instances of delays and human error....http://www.prweb.com/releases/eurowire/nexorone/prweb974654.htm
Offshore banking: http://www.escapeartist.com/Offshore_Banking/
http://www.offshore-protection.com/
There is heavier competition from offshore banks for illicit US money as has ever existed in spite of the UBS ‘threat’.
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