Offshore bank accounts–getting riskier
by Linda Beale
Offshore bank accounts–getting riskier
crossposted with Ataxingmatter
As I noted in an earlier posting, the IRS has continued its focus on secret offshore bank accounts. Naturally, the media covers this issue for their wealthy readers who are following the IRS’s every action in this matter. See, e.g., Paul Sullivan, Hiding Money Overseas? You’re Taking a Big Chance, NYTimes, Feb. 4, 2010.
Sullivan runs through the ways that it has become riskier to hide accounts, as Wikileaks now has indicated that it plans a release of additional names provided by a whistleblower. It’s not just whistleblowers that secret account holders need to worry about, of course. Jilted lovers, business competitors, disgruntled employees–anyone who knows about the account could turn into a whistleblower for personal reasons, with the whistleblower reward just icing on the cake.
Sullivan reminds us that keeping money offshore isn’t illegal in itself; rather, it is the failure to report and pay taxes on the income according to US tax laws that is the illegal activity. Some of those caught by the law are unintentional scofflaws. Sullivan runs through the various reasons that someone may end up facing a penalty for an offshore account even though they had no intention of using the account to evade tax laws, such as beneficiaries of Holocaust survivors who had moved assets into Swiss banks to escape Nazi confiscation.
For the evaders, Sullivan talks about their “risk” of getting caught and their risk of paying significant penalties. But what seems to be missing from Sullivan’s account is any real sense of disgust for those who do intentionally decide to evade their income tax responsibilities. That’s quite likely criminal fraud.
Linda
no doubt it is. but i can’t share your disgust. Fraud against vulnerable people is one thing, but cheating on your taxes is a time honored recreational activity. No, MR IRS Man, don’t bother to audit me. I don’t make enough for it to be worth cheating, and anyway I am so disgusted at the system that I would never give you the satisfaction of cheating.
Besides I am much more likely to feel disgust at the legal cheaters. The ones who can ask their Congressmen for a “tax incentive.” And of course the true believers who will defend this as “pfreedom.”
I don’t know that “disgust” is appropriate. If you had a significant amount of money that you thought was rightfully yours, and you believed that the government wastes most of the money it gets, and you thought you had a way to hide it from the tax man, you wouldn’t have to be a very disgusting person to try to get away with it.
Of course the tax man’s job is to make that difficult or dangerous.
But I think your disgust would be better focused at the guys who are big enough to go to Congress and get “tax incentives”. And the politicians who lie about the government spending that is needed for the country and the people. And maybe just a little for the other politicians who have favorite causes that can never have enough money, even if they are a little vague about exactly how it is spent.
agreed. can’t say i wouldn’t do the same if i hit the lottery.
however, i do take exception with the “little vague” approach. seems to me the dirksen axiom is what got us here to begin with.