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In true conspiracy movie fashion, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that they entered a partnership with Switzerland to get secret bank accounts at the UBS Bank and other banks to follow.

Whatever happened to bank secrecy law?

This one is legal though. The US IRS used a broad John Doe summons against UBS for the Southern District of Floria, Miami Division. The reason: the IRS is on the scent for those accounts where securities, stocks and other investment assets were held and where an individual indirectly held ownership of accounts.

Here are more details from the report of jpost.com:

“What will the IRS do with information it gets?

Information provided to the IRS through the above process will be examined for potential civil and criminal tax violations. The IRS will assess any additional tax, interest and a number of applicable penalties. This includes the penalty for the willful failure to file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) with the US Treasury. This penalty can be up to 50 percent of the value of the account for each year an FBAR was not filed. Various other reporting requirements, penalties and sanctions also exist.

The IRS says it will recommend criminal prosecution in those cases where the facts warrant such an action. To date, the IRS and the US Department of Justice have “successfully” prosecuted four US customers of UBS whose information was provided to the IRS by UBS as part of an earlier Deferred Prosecution Agreement.

Time frame

The agreement between the US and Swiss governments requires the Swiss government to set up a special task force to deal with treaty requests and imposes strict deadlines for doing so. To avoid any foot-dragging, if the actual results after 370 days differ significantly from the results that can be reasonably expected, either country may take “proportionate rebalancing measures to remedy the imbalance.” ”

Here is the video report from Bloomberg:

Source: jpost.com