Today, the IRS announced that they reopened the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program for taxpayers with undeclared foreign accounts.

On January 3, 2012, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged three Swiss bankers with hiding more than $1.2 billion in U.S. taxpayer accounts from the IRS. The announcement was made by Preet Bharar, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney.

The Internal Revenue Service released details of its plan to show some leniency on the penalties for failure to file tax returns and Foreign Bank Account Reports for the American citizens living abroad.

Credit Suisse AG, the second largest bank of Switzerland, has notified some of its U.S. clients that it will disclose their identities and account details to the Internal Revenue Service.

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.

The Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced on June 28, 2011, that Dr. Arvind Ahuja of Wisconsin was indicted on four counts of willfully filing materially false tax returns and four counts of failing to file Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBARs).

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

On Tuesday, February 8, 2011, the Internal Revenue Service announced a new amnesty program for taxpayers with hidden offshore bank accounts. The new Voluntary Disclosure Initiative is intended to bring people with unreported offshore income and undisclosed offshore accounts back into compliance.

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.

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.