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.
Not long ago, U.S. settlements in the hundreds of millions of dollars for violations of American law by a foreign bank seemed unlikely, if not out of the realm of possibility altogether. Then came the $780 million deferred prosecution agreement with UBS AG in 2009.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 and UBS AG asked a Miami judge Friday to again delay a tax evasion hearing so the parties could hash out the details of a preliminary settlement.
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.
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.
Bank secrecy jurisdictions have lobbied behind the scenes to weaken a United Nations call for greater international cooperation on tax evasion expected to be issued this week, say tax policy analysts.
At least half a dozen Swiss banks are scaling back their dealings with wealthy U.S. clients following a nearly $800 million penalty against UBS AG, according to news reports and tax analysts.
A Lichtenstein bank accused by U.S. lawmakers of aiding tax evaders could face sanctions on the heels of a nearly $800 million penalty against UBS AG, according to banking consultants.
Switzerland's largest bank will pay $780 million to the United States for helping 17,000 U.S. citizens evade paying taxes on offshore revenue, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.
Federal authorities Wednesday charged the former head of UBS's offshore private banking division with helping tens of thousands of U.S. clients conceal billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service.
An increase in the number of individuals coming clean about secreting away money will mean greater government scrutiny of foreign bank accounts and complicit financial institutions, say tax attorneys.
The United States and Liechtenstein have signed a tax information exchange agreement that would give U.S. authorities more leverage in finding American tax evaders.
Though offshore banking jurisdictions have recently been the subject of worldwide scrutiny for being illegal tax havens, compliance officers should be able to separate facts from fiction, according to the chairman of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.
A federal judge's ruling may have nudged U.S. courts closer to treating tax evasion as a predicate crime for money laundering, legal experts say.