Tax Lawyer's Blog

Professor Paul Caron reports that Tax Analysts have named the Tax Person of 2009:

Tax Analysts has named its Tax Person of the Year:  Bradley Birkenfeld, the whistleblower in the UBS offshore tax shelter case:

Birkenfeld must be considered among the biggest whistle-blowers of all time. He is the Benedict Arnold of the private banking industry and single-handedly made 2009 the year in which the world finally got serious about cracking down on tax evasion. His story is both personally compelling and significant in terms of the sudden changes it has brought to our tax system.

Although Birkenfeld is responsible for the snaring of countless tax cheats, he’s no ordinary hero. His hands were hardly clean in the UBS affair. Like a Shakespearean protagonist, he seems as flawed as he is noble. What’s undeniable, though, is that the consequences of his actions have affected millions of taxpayers, the global financial sector, and tax administrations around the world. For all of these reasons, Bradley Birkenfeld is Tax Notes‘ Person of the Year for 2009….

CBS’ 60 Minutes ran a segment last night about Birkenfeld, the former UBS employee:

When Birkenfeld, a midlevel banker with an undistinguished employment history, knocked on the door of the U.S. Justice Department in the spring of 2007, he touched off an investigation that would threaten one of the world’s largest banks with extinction and shake 300 years of Swiss banking secrecy to the foundations of its underground vaults.

He did it by providing inside information and documentation that his former employer, banking giant UBS, was actively involved in helping its American clients defraud the U.S. Treasury out of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes.

Birkenfeld’s whistleblowing, however, didn’t spare him jail time. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison for conspiring to defraud the U.S. government.

Aside: Professor Caron himself was a nominee for Tax Person of the Year. I guess they never give these awards to the good guys.

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