Tax Haven | featured news

Negotiators initial settlement that averts legal showdown over U.S. government's landmark challenge to Swiss bank secrecy, lawyer says.

Reuters - Switzerland's UBS will not have to pay a fine as part of the settlement of a tax evasion dispute with the United States, two Swiss newspapers reported on Sunday.

U.S. has been seeking data on depositors suspected of using UBS bank accounts to hide cash from IRS.

The U.S. and Swiss governments and banking giant UBS AG indicated Sunday they were seeking a settlement and asked a federal judge ...

UBS AG Chief Executive Oswald Gruebel sent a memorandum to the bank's top executives on Thursday saying the bank could not comply with a U.S. government request to disclose the identity of 52,000 secret account holders, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

The government said it would seize the bank’s client data, which U.S. authorities have demanded to settle a tax case.

Swiss bank UBS AG "systematically and deliberately" violated U.S. law by dispatching private bankers to recruit wealthy Americans interested in evading taxes and must be forced to reveal the identities of 52,000 of those clients, the Justice Department said in a court filing Tuesday.

They say the president's proposal would unfairly penalize U.S. companies that are trying to compete in global markets.

Officials say measures to shut down offshore tax havens would bring the government $210 billion over the next decade in otherwise lost tax revenue.

A Senate report estimated in 2008 that the United States loses up to $100 billion a year in tax revenue to offshore tax havens (PDF). In a report released Wednesday, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group offers a state-by-state breakdown of the cost to taxpayers of tax revenue lost to "shell companies and sham headquarters" in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.