The Internal Revenue Service announced that 12,000 new applications came in from the 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative (OVDI) program that closed last week. This pushed the total to 30,000 since the program began in 2009.

On Wednesday, July 6, 2011, the Swiss government adopted standards on banking secrecy laid out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, which will allow foreign authorities to pursue citizens suspected of using hidden Swiss accounts for tax evasion.

IRS Posts New Frequently Asked Questions for the 2011 OVDI Program

U.S. government decided to prosecute a taxpayer who made a so-called “quiet disclosure” of his offshore account at HSBC.

On April 7, 2011, the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal district court in San Francisco to force HSBC USA to disclose the names of their U.S. customers suspected of having secret bank accounts in India.

The IRS issued a new notice, Notice 2001-31, providing guidance to taxpayers on how they should answer questions on their 2010 federal income tax and information returns relating to foreign financial accounts (FFAs).

U.S. prosecutors have charged an ex-UBS banker with tax fraud for encouraging his wealthy American clients not to disclose to U.S. tax authorities that they had money in offshore accounts.

Holtz, Slavett & Drabkin, APLC is proud to sponsor the 26th Annual UCLA Tax Controversy Institute, which will take place on October 26, 2010, at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

In a recent case of United States v. J. Bryan Williams, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found that the government had failed to meet its burden to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that a taxpayer willfully failed to report his interest in a foreign bank accounts that were omitted from the individual’s 2000 tax return.

On August 26, 2010, the Swiss government said it had reviewed approximately 4,450 UBS client accounts and that half of the data had already been handed over to the United States.