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Facing Tax Evasion Charges, UBS Claimed Its Hands Were Tied: Former PSI Counsel
printIn anti-money laundering circles, the power of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is a rare thing. In July, the committee found that UBS AG and LGT Bank helped U.S. taxpayers avoid reporting billions of dollars in taxable revenue. Holding the hearing on the banks bolstered the U.S. Justice Department's case against UBS and helped bring LGT's home jurisdiction, Liechtenstein, to the bargaining table with U.S. officials seeking greater access to information on tax evaders, according to Mike Flowers, a former counsel with the committee, known as the PSI. Flowers recently spoke with ACAMS moneylaundering.com editor-in-chief Kieran Beer and...
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Former UBS AG employee Stephanie Gibaud in 2008 was faced with the choice of whether to comply with her employer's request that she destroy records potentially indicating that the bank had courted tax-evading clients. When she refused, the bank psychologically bullied her until she departed in 2012.
Lawmakers slated to take control of the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will likely bring more than individual agendas to the powerful investigative body. For banks, they may bring a reprieve.
With new international data-exchange agreements in place, the United Kingdom will soon have greater access than ever to information on tax dodgers with offshore accounts, according to the nation's Financial Secretary to the Treasury David Gauke.
If the acquittal of Raoul Weil earlier this week was for Swiss bankers a sign of hope and for American prosecutors a signal disappointment, it was both for a single reason. The verdict reflected the limits to U.S. ambitions to punish foreign bankers.
In his 12-year career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Daniel W. Levy has investigated and prosecuted several banks, bankers, and financial services advisors that facilitated the evasion of U.S. taxes through the use of complicit offshore financial institutions.
As settlement negotiations with Swiss banks continue, the IRS is turning its attention to jurisdictions outside of Europe, including two set to eclipse Switzerland as the world's top secrecy havens.
U.S. Fifth Amendment protections cannot shield Bank Secrecy Act reports from grand jury and other subpoenas, two appellate courts have ruled in tax evasion-related cases.
An expected agreement between the United Kingdom and Switzerland to tax half of the income of Britons keeping undeclared assets in Swiss bank accounts is a significant step backward in the fight against bank secrecy, say tax reform advocates.
Switzerland will begin disclosing account data on nearly 4,000 UBS AG clients within a week after Swiss lawmakers Thursday approved the handover, marking an unprecedented exception to the country's bank secrecy laws.
A new IRS division focusing on recovering lost tax revenue from the ultra-wealthy has begun auditing individuals, according to a corporate tax attorney at a Washington, D.C. law firm.
Plans to make tax evasion a predicate crime of money laundering will likely be successful despite speculation that broader financial regulatory reform is foundering, say Capitol Hill staffers.
It is an exciting time for IRS investigators who are now able to examine the UBS AG accounts of over 4,500 U.S. citizens suspected of hiding assets offshore, according to John Everett, a licensed criminal investigator and certified fraud examiner based in Agoura Hills, California.
The head of the Senate's powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is pushing for the establishment of international agreements to penalize banks known to help tax evaders.
Switzerland's largest bank agreed Wednesday to release details to the United States on 4,450 accounts held by U.S. taxpayers suspected of failing to report a total of $18 billion in revenue, the parties said.
The United States and UBS AG said Wednesday that they had reached an agreement over whether U.S. investigators could access data on the bank's tax evading American clients.
The United States has reached a tentative agreement with UBS AG and Switzerland over a bank program that allowed U.S. tax payers to avoid reporting billions of dollars in revenue.
A Miami judge Monday granted a two-week stay of a hearing on whether the United States can force UBS AG to turn over data on 52,000 suspected U.S. tax evaders.
In the wake of an extensive proposal forwarded by the Obama administration to stem tax evasion, anti-money laundering compliance departments are looking again at what they can and must do to fight the crime.
The Obama administration's plans to curb foreign institutions from aiding U.S. tax evaders is short on details, but could block U.S. citizens and residents' access to foreign banks and put a new compliance burden on U.S. institutions, say some tax professionals.
Financial regulation is in the early stages of undergoing its biggest change since the passage of the U.S. Patriot Act, according to Mike Flowers, a former counsel for the U.S. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.