IRS may be missing offshore tax evasion: government watchdog
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service may be missing potential tax dodgers who report their foreign accounts but who avoid paying penalties by not reporting previous years' returns, a government watchdog said in a report released on Friday.
To avoid steep penalties for offshore tax evasion, some taxpayers are making "quiet disclosures" to the IRS, reporting for the first time offshore accounts that could appear to the IRS as newly opened accounts, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress.
The government re-opened a voluntary amnesty program in 2009, the same year Swiss Bank UBS AG agreed to pay $780 million to settle charges the bank was helping Americans stash income abroad to escape U.S. taxes. It has collected $5.5 billion from about 38,000 complying taxpayers since then.
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