The 3 Biggest Surprises From An Investigation Into A Swiss Bank That Helps Americans Dodge Taxes

[okaawhatever]

1. Credit Suisse actively recruited American clients, rather than acting as a passive facilitator. While you might think that a rich American looking to duck tax liabilities would have to go seek out the right banker to help him, the Senate investigation says that’s not the case. In over 150 separate trips from 2001 to 2008, the bank sent employees from Switzerland to the U.S. “to secretly recruit clients” at golf tournaments, swanky formal parties put on by Swiss socialites, and individual meetings. To justify the trips to their bosses, bankers had to show that at least a quarter of their meetings were with “prospects” who didn’t yet have accounts.

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2. American authorities are doing a poor job fighting Swiss tax evasion. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have talked a big game about cracking down on the kinds of practices revealed in the committee’s report for five years now, but the investigation concludes that the agencies aren’t backing up their big talk. “DOJ and IRS enforcement efforts to hold U.S. tax evaders and Swiss banks accountable for misconduct have bogged down,” the investigators write, with prosecutors failing to act on the information banks have already shared. The UBS settlement produced a list of 4,700 American accountholder names, yet the DOJ has only prosecuted 71 tax evaders from that list.

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3. 3. The amount of American money hidden away at just one Swiss bank is massive. Credit Suisse’s work with American clients peaked in 2006, according to the report, with more than 22,000 accounts linked to the U.S. and between $10 and $12 billion in total assets held in them. Not all of those assets were hidden from American authorities, but investigators write that the “vast majority” were. Estimates of how much money the bank hid from American tax authorities range widely depending on how the estimates are done, the report says, from a $5 billion estimate using the bank’s own methods to a $12 billion estimate using a more rigorous approach.


In total, individual and corporate tax evasion costs the country an estimated $300 billion each year. Swiss banks play a key role in that evasion, but they are far from alone in recruiting and facilitating American tax dodgers. Tuesday’s report casts serious doubt on the ongoing crackdown effort by IRS and DOJ officials, which is also being undermined by budget cuts to key portions of the IRS budget


From an article in 2011 DailyKos.

Among the $39 billion in spending cuts contained in the budget deal reached last, one stands out as perhaps the most cynical - and counterproductive. Republicans insisted that the Internal Revenue Service receive no additional funding through September, rebuffing President Obama's request for an additional $600 million to crack down on the tax fraud, evasion and cheating now costing the U.S. an estimated $330 billion annually. But if that act of Republican intransigence, one which will raise the deficit by $3.4 billion, sounds familiar, it should. It's just the latest front in the never-ending GOP war on the IRS underway since the 1990's.

The Boehner brigade fired the first salvo in the GOP budget which passed the House in February. Rejecting the President's ask for a 9% boost - and 5,100 more workers - for the IRS this year, Republicans demanded more cuts in 2012 and beyond. The GOP jihad wasn't merely payback for the Obama administration's crackdown on wealthy tax cheats, but a preemptive strike to gut enforcement of the individual health insurance mandate due in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act.

In other words, cut spending by $600 million, lose $4 billion in revenue and add $3.4 billion to the deficit. That's absurd arithmetic and unfair to the large majority of taxpayers who pay what they should. Shulman said the IRS collected $2.345 trillion in fiscal 2010, ended last Sept. 30, some 93 percent of federal receipts.



http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/02/26/3332701/senate-investigation-tax-evasion-credit-suisse/#

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/12/966248/-In-Budget-Deal-GOP-Handcuffs-the-IRS-Again#

[freshwest]

1. Good emphasis on 'budget cuts to key portions of the IRS budget.'

The shutdown and sequester didn't help either, after years of Nordquist 'starving the beast' that most Americans cheered.

It is all intentional to deny the government the power to regulate and enforce laws on the books, from domestic abuse laws, closing GITMO, enforcing laws that would give the government power to go after these guys.

I won't attack the feds of the DOJ and IRS as if this was done in a vacuum. The GOP has a mission to destabilitze this nation since Reagan and after decades of this, it's having a hard time keeping its head and ideals above water.

Another loss in the ongoing - as in right now - election season in the states and the congressional and senate seats - from a daily diet of mealy mouthed complaints at a Democratic administration trying to hold the line - will give us another 2010 and a fatal waterboarding.

The GOP has been torturing all public employees, all programs and the concept of government like sadistic laughing killers.

Know your enemy and support your brothers, or the GOP wins the game for good this time.

EOM.

[Democracyinkind]

2. No. 2 is the astounding part.

They have almost all Swiss banks by the balls and yet seem to have trouble to produce cases. Undermanned IRS?

[redqueen]

3. K&R

It is depressing how little is done about this, while the commons is being decimated.