IRS going after Swiss bank records

Posted on July 1st, 2008 by bile

http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/…

The Internal Revenue Service is taking the unprecedented step of seeking Swiss bank records in search of what it suspects could be up to $20 billion worth of assets hidden by U.S. taxpayers.

Justice Department lawyers said late Monday that they had filed court documents in Miami asking a judge to allow the IRS to get information from the banking giant UBS. U.S. investigators are seeking permission for the first time to serve what are called “John Doe” summons to obtain information about possible tax fraud against taxpayers whose identities are not known.

Information stemming from a guilty plea by a former UBS banker last week in Miami suggests the Zurich-based bank had “undeclared” accounts of U.S. taxpayers estimated at about $20 billion. U.S. tax laws require any accounts abroad worth more than $10,000 to be reported — and penalties call for up to half of the amount in a hidden account to be forfeited.

The U.S. government is trying to cooperate with the Swiss government and the bank, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John DiCicco said. But he added, “We are prepared to seek enforcement if that process is not successful.”

Enforcement? What the hell does that mean? World court or troops? It’s sad the latter is the first I think of.

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3 Responses to “IRS going after Swiss bank records”

beetlbumjl Says:
July 1st, 2008 at 8:41 am

Should UBS fail to fork over the names, I’d imagine they’d drop this little news article in front of them:

UBS AG was attempting to liquidate an $11 billion “albatross” of auction-rate bonds by selling the debt to individual investors as the market for the securities started to collapse, according to company e-mails.

While executives at the Zurich-based bank identified the hazards of auction-rate securities in August, they simultaneously began to “mobilize the troops,” holding more than a dozen conference calls with salesmen and giving them new marketing materials to promote the bonds, according to e-mails from David Shulman, the head of UBS’s municipal securities group. “The pressure is on to move inventory,” he said in an Aug. 30 note.

[snip]

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and at least nine state regulators are investigating how banks sold the bonds. Individual investors have also filed lawsuits and complaints with state and federal regulators.
[snip]
The collapse of the auction-rate market didn’t stop the bankers from seeing an opportunity. When hundreds of auctions were permitted to fail in February, many municipalities were forced to pay interest rates approaching 20 percent, and they called their bankers looking to refinance the debt, which would generate new underwriting fees.

“We have a money making opportunity,” Seema Mohanty, an investment banker at UBS, wrote to Shulman on Feb. 14. “They are desperate.”

Shulman in an e-mail that day called the refinancing of the bonds “the single greatest opportunity in decades for us to leverage our banking relationships.”

“This is a bankers dream market,” he wrote.

How about no names, no charter to operate in the US. All a giant bluff I imagine, but the federal gov’t does have some leverage. However, don’t the Swiss have the most guns per capita in Europe? Could be fun.

invisipunk Says:
July 1st, 2008 at 8:57 am

That why I hide my money in the Cayman Islands / secret hidden airship.

bile Says:
July 1st, 2008 at 2:05 pm

I don’t see how not telling someone something is fraud. Regardless, I don’t see what that has to do with the US government going after “hidden” assets in another country with historically strong privacy laws WRT banking.

IRS going after Swiss bank records

3 Responses to “IRS going after Swiss bank records”

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