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.
Igor Drabkin to Speak at the FBAR Seminar
In response to increased scrutiny of offshore bank accounts by U.S. authorities, Bank Leumi, Israel’s biggest bank, is requiring U.S. clients to declare their deposits to the IRS.
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.