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.
IRS has put in place a program aimed at auditing taxpayers who did a so called “quiet disclosure” — those who chose not to make a voluntary disclosure, but rather chose to quietly file amended tax returns and FBARs.
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.