Tax Lawyer's Blog

Reuters reports that actor Paul Hogan, best known for playing an outback hunter in the “Crocodile Dundee” movies, has been stopped from leaving Australia until he pays a multi-million dollar tax bill:
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) served U.S.-based Hogan with a departure prohibition order when he returned to Sydney last Friday for the funeral of his [...]

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The Independent reports that Tiger Woods may be following Usain Bolt’s lead in avoiding competition in the UK for tax reasons:
Tiger Woods’ reluctance to accept a Ryder Cup wild card may in part be due to a £1m tax bill he could face for playing in the event, which pays no prize money. Aside from [...]

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Neutral Switzerland is getting it’s ass handed to it for taking sides with tax cheats.
Jack Townsend of Federal Tax Crimes blog says that Germany is following America’s lead in pursuing Swiss banks for allowing tax scofflaws to evade taxes in their home countries:
German authorities are raiding German offices of Credit Suisse. As noted in one article [...]

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Linda Beale reports that the Swiss Parliament has ratified the U.S.-Swiss agreement providing for the release of  U.S. account-holder information on about 4,500 accounts:
It is likely that the names will start flowing very soon, which moves the ball back to the U.S.  The voluntary disclosure program that provided some assurance of limited penalties has ended.  But voluntary [...]

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George Russell of Fox News reports that the United Nations’ proposal to levy an international tax on Internet commerce has hit a dead end:
A controversial  United Nations plan to impose consumer taxes on such things as Internet activity and paying bills online in order to drastically restructure the world drug industry hit a wall of disagreement on [...]

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The Associated Press reports that on Friday a UBS investor was sentenced to ten months prison time for federal tax evasion after claiming that he was compelled to hide his assets because his parents had lost everything fleeing the Nazi’s during the Holocaust.
Taxpayer Jack Barouh says he had a psychological compulsion to hide his assets in a UBS account [...]

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AIG wants to sell one if it’s subsidiaries, the American Life Insurance Company (“ALICO”), to MetLife but will first have to get a private letter ruling from the IRS.
Here’s the New York Times’ Mary Williams Walsh and Michael J. de la Merced:
AIG announced almost a year ago that it would sell… ALICO, to raise about $9 billion [...]

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If the UBS scandal didn’t convince you that the Obama administration is going whole hog after U.S. taxpayers with offshore bank accounts, perhaps a recent article written by Dean Mark Mason for Taxes, The Tax Magazine will.
The piece is titled Foreign Bank Accounts – FBAR Reporting Obligations, Enforcement Exposures and Managing the Risk: What Every Tax and [...]

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WebCPA reports that Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court has ruled that the agreement between Switzerland and the US requiring UBS to disclose the names of more than 4,000 American taxpayer investors violates Swiss bank secrecy laws:
The ruling last Friday on 26 sets of bank accounts threatens a deal that the Swiss and U.S. governments hammered out last August after [...]

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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 [...]

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