More than 14,700 Americans have disclosed their secret foreign bank accounts

According to American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) more than 14,700 Americans have disclosed their secret foreign bank account under the amnesty program agreeing to repatriate the assets and pay back taxes and interest as well as reduced penalties. One major reason for this has without doubt been the between the IRS and the Swiss bank UBS where UBS has agreed to turn over the names of about 4,450 American clients suspected by the IRS of using the bank’s offshore services to evade taxes.

Those UBS clients who has not turned themselves in and are on the bank’s list of accounts face back taxes and fines that well can exceed what they own, as well as potential prosecution and jail time.

In 2003 did launch a similar amnesty with the objective to luring Americans who evaded taxes through offshore credit cards to declare their savings in a correct manner in the US. That ‘campaign’ led drew only 1,300 Americans to disclose their savings in foreign offshore savings account and therefore the last campaign must be said to be a huge success for the IRS.

According to the I.R.S. documents, UBS will disclose American clients who had unreported accounts of at least a million Swiss francs. UBS will also disclose Americans who were the owners of secret offshore sham company accounts with that total. The accounts in question cover 2001 through 2008.

Update on German Authorities buying information on Germans having hidden money in Swiss Banks Accounts

Since a couple of months ago there have been a lot of fuzz in the media regarding data with information about Germans having undeclared money in Swiss Banks Accounts. The data has been stolen from a Swiss bank and the person who has stolen the information has offered the German state to buy the information.

The German authorities did already in 2008 purchase data stolen from a bank in Lichtenstein and earlier this year the German federal government authorized the state authorities to buy the information, even though it was obtained illegally. Therefore it seemed rather obvious that the states would take the opportunity to hit hard against the tax evasion and on Friday a spokesperson for North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) said it now had received the information about the bank accounts bank on a CD. How much it has paid for the information was not revealed.

The case has deeply shaken Switzerland’s large private banking industry and Germans hold an estimated 200 billion euros in undeclared funds in Swiss banks. Only in the past months almost 6 000 Germans have turned themselves in to the authorities which is expected to make it possible for the German authorities to recover about 500 million euros of lost taxes.