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Banking in Switzerland dates to the early 18th century through Switzerland's merchant trade and has, over the centuries, grown into a complex, regulated, and international industry. Banking is seen as emblematic of Switzerland. The country has a long history of banking secrecy and client confidentiality reaching back to the early 1700s. Starting as a way to protect wealthy European banking interests, Swiss banking secrecy was codified in 1934 with the passage of a landmark federal law, the Federal Act on Banks and Savings Banks. These laws, which were used to protect assets of persons being persecuted by Nazi authorities, have also been used by people and institutions seeking to illegally evade taxes, hide assets, or generally commit financial crime.
An offshore bank is a bank that is operated and regulated under international banking license, which usually prohibits the bank from establishing any business activities in the jurisdiction of establishment. Due to less regulation and transparency, accounts with offshore banks were often used to hide undeclared income. Since the 1980s, jurisdictions that provide financial services to nonresidents on a big scale can be referred to as offshore financial centres. OFCs often also levy little or no corporation tax and/or personal income and high direct taxes such as duty, making the cost of living high.
Tax avoidance is the legal usage of the tax regime in a single territory to one's own advantage to reduce the amount of tax that is payable by means that are within the law. A tax shelter is one type of tax avoidance, and tax havens are jurisdictions that facilitate reduced taxes. Tax avoidance should not be confused with tax evasion, which is illegal. Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they describe a range of activities that intend to subvert a state's tax system.
Tax evasion is an illegal attempt to defeat the imposition of taxes by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. Tax evasion often entails the deliberate misrepresentation of the taxpayer's affairs to the tax authorities to reduce the taxpayer's tax liability, and it includes dishonest tax reporting, declaring less income, profits or gains than the amounts actually earned, overstating deductions, using bribes against authorities in countries with high corruption rates and hiding money in secret locations.
Tax amnesty allows taxpayers to voluntarily disclose and pay tax owing in exchange for avoiding tax evasion penalties. It is a limited-time opportunity for a specified group of taxpayers to pay a defined amount, in exchange for forgiveness of a tax liability relating to previous tax periods. It typically expires when some authority begins a tax investigation of the past-due tax.
A tax protester, in the United States, is a person who denies that he or she owes a tax based on the belief that the Constitution of the United States, statutes, or regulations do not empower the government to impose, assess or collect the tax. The tax protester may have no dispute with how the government spends its revenue. This differentiates a tax protester from a tax resister, who seeks to avoid paying a tax because the tax is being used for purposes with which the resister takes issue.
Financial intelligence (FININT) is the gathering of information about the financial affairs of entities of interest, to understand their nature and capabilities, and predict their intentions. Generally the term applies in the context of law enforcement and related activities. One of the main purposes of financial intelligence is to identify financial transactions that may involve tax evasion, money laundering or some other criminal activity. FININT may also be involved in identifying financing of criminal and terrorist organisations. Financial intelligence can be broken down into two main areas, collection and analysis. Collection is normally done by a government agency, known as a financial intelligence organisation or Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). The agency will collect raw transactional information and Suspicious activity reports (SAR) usually provided by banks and other entities as part of regulatory requirements. Data may be shared with other countries through intergovernmental networks. Analysis, may consist of scrutinizing a large volume of transactional data using data mining or data-matching techniques to identify persons potentially engaged in a particular activity. SARs can also be scrutinized and linked with other data to try to identify specific activity.
Major General George Hamden Olmsted was an American military officer and insurance executive. Throughout Olmsted's career, he was a champion of the concepts of better education, jobs, and opportunities for all people. In the fields of banking and insurance, he brought availability and affordability of products and services to a market that was battered by the Great Depression. He carried on the dream of Arthur J. Morris, the founder of Financial General Corporation, that "anyone who has a steady job can qualify for installment credit from a bank".
Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the United States federal law enforcement agency responsible for investigating potential criminal violations of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes, such as money laundering, currency transaction violations, tax-related identity theft fraud and terrorist financing that adversely affect tax administration. While other federal agencies also have investigative jurisdiction for money laundering and some Bank Secrecy Act violations, IRS-CI is the only federal agency that can investigate potential criminal violations of the Internal Revenue Code, in a manner intended to foster confidence in the tax system and deter violations of tax law. Criminal Investigation is a division of the Internal Revenue Service, which in turn is a bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury.
The 2008 Liechtenstein tax affair is a series of tax investigations in numerous countries whose governments suspect that some of their citizens may have evaded tax obligations by using banks and trusts in Liechtenstein; the affair broke open with the biggest complex of investigations ever initiated for tax evasion in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is seen also as an attempt to put pressure on Liechtenstein, one of the remaining uncooperative tax havens, as identified by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on money laundering of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, along with Andorra and Monaco, in 2007.
Bradley Charles Birkenfeld is an American private banker, convicted felon, and whistleblower. During the mid- to late-2000s, he made a series of disclosures about UBS Group AG clients, in violation of Swiss banking secrecy laws, to the U.S. government alleging possible tax evasion. Known as the 2007 "Birkenfeld Disclosure", the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it had reached a deferred prosecution agreement with UBS that resulted in a US$780 million fine and the release of previously privileged information on American tax evaders.
United States v. Payner, 447 U.S. 727 (1980), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court reversed a district court's suppression of evidence in the criminal prosecution of an Ohio businessman charged with tax evasion. The case concerned both issues of criminal procedure and the application of the exclusionary rule derived from the Fourth Amendment. By a 6–3 margin the Court both reaffirmed its earlier rulings' holding that only the party whose Fourth Amendment protections may have been violated has standing to challenge the evidence seized in the search, and barred lower courts from exercising their supervisory power to exclude such evidence at the trial of third parties.
Paul Lional Edward Helliwell was an American lawyer, banker, OSS official, and CIA officer. While serving in this capacity he became director of Sea Supply, Inc. and president of Castle Bank & Trust. Helliwell was instrumental in setting up Civil Air Transport and Castle Bank & Trust, both of which were CIA proprietary companies. According to The Wall Street Journal, he was "deeply involved" in financing covert actions against Cuba from 1964 to 1975. Helliwell was reported to have played a key role in the purchase of the site for Disney World.
The Investigation Division of the CBDT, abbreviated as Inv-CBDT, is the revenue enforcement agency of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, Government of India. It functions under the Department of Revenue in the Union Ministry of Finance and is concerned with the collection and administration of, as well as enforcement and prosecution of cases related to, the various direct taxes accruing to the Union Government.
Under the federal law of the United States of America, tax evasion or tax fraud is the purposeful illegal attempt of a taxpayer to evade assessment or payment of a tax imposed by Federal law. Conviction of tax evasion may result in fines and imprisonment. Compared to other countries, Americans are more likely to pay their taxes on time and law-abidingly.
The Swiss investment bank and financial services company, UBS Group AG, has been at the center of numerous tax evasion and avoidance investigations undertaken by U.S., French, German, Israeli, and Belgian tax authorities as a consequence of their strict banking secrecy practices.
Swiss Leaks is a journalistic investigation, released in February 2015, of a giant tax evasion scheme allegedly operated with the knowledge and encouragement of the British multinational bank HSBC via its Swiss subsidiary, HSBC Private Bank (Suisse). Triggered by leaked information from French computer analyst Hervé Falciani on accounts held by over 100,000 clients and 20,000 offshore companies with HSBC in Geneva, the disclosed information was then called "the biggest leak in Swiss banking history".
The tax status of the Church of Scientology in the United States has been the subject of decades of controversy and litigation. Although the Church of Scientology was initially partially exempted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from paying federal income tax, its two principal entities in the United States lost this exemption in 1957 and 1968. This action was taken because of concerns that church funds were being used for the private gain of its founder L. Ron Hubbard or due to an international psychiatric conspiracy against Scientology.
The Indian Revenue Service , often abbreviated to IRS (Customs&CentralExcise) or IRS (Customs&IndirectTaxes), now called IRS(Customs&GST) is a part of central civil service of the Government of India. It functions under the Department of Revenue of the Ministry of Finance and is under the administrative direction of the Revenue Secretary and the ministerial command of the Minister of Finance. The IRS is primarily responsible for collecting and administering indirect taxes accruing to the Government of India. It is one of the largest civil service amongst the organised civil services in the Indian government and serves the nation through discharging sovereign functions of collection of revenue for development, security and governance.
The Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The files were uncovered and exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and other news organizations. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and were leaked in 2015 by an anonymous source.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Drinkhall, Jim (24 April 1980). "CIA Helped Quash Major, Star-Studded Tax Evasion Case". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved 18 July 2017.
- ↑ Are Bahamas Banks Offering Tax Haven? The Pittsburgh Press 30 December 1975
- ↑ Second Bahaman bank goes under Star-News 26 May 1977
- ↑ Law Agencies Probing Caribbean Tax Havens Sarasota Herald-Tribune 25 April 1976
- ↑ IRS Resumes Probe of Secret Offshore Accounts The Milwaukee Sentinel 27 December 1975
- ↑ Conflict at IRS? by Jack Anderson The Telegraph 25 October 1976
- ↑ "Attorney is Acquitted of Tax-Evasion Charges". The New York Times. 13 September 1977. p. 47. Retrieved 19 August 2020.
- ↑ Loop lawyer convicted in tax fraud scheme Chicago Tribune 25 February 1982
