The timing of Bradley Birkenfeld's petition for clemency should be lost on no one. Today is tax day--the day that honest, hardworking Americans file their tax returns.
Bradley Birkenfeld is the whistleblower who exposed the $20 billion offshore illegal tax fraud scheme of UBS, Switzerland's largest bank. The U.S. thanked him by sending him to prison. In other words, the person solely responsible for the recovery of billions of U.S. tax dollars is the same person who has served more time than anyone connected to the UBS scandal.
I urge you to join a sign-on letter to President Obama urging clemency for Mr. Birkenfeld. My organization, the Government Accountability Project, has done so.
Today is tax day, the day that honest hardworking Americans file their tax returns. But on tax day this year a great injustice continues:
Today is also the day that President Obama can fix this injustice by issuing a full presidential pardon or commuting Mr. Birkenfeld's sentence to time-served immediately. Mr. Birkenfeld put tax money back in the hands of every American. We must return the favor and demand the he be released from prison.
Here is a fact sheet on Mr. Birkenfeld's case. You can also read the petition for commutation of sentence sent to the Pardon Attorney.
As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes recognized, "a pardon" is
not a private act of grace... it is part of the Constitutional scheme.
It constitutes a determination that the public welfare will be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed.
The record of this case demonstrates that the "public welfare" will be best served if President Obama,pursuant to Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution, issues a full pardon to Mr. Birkenfeld. In the alternative, I hope that President Obama will use his authority
to commute his sentence to time served (a year and a half under house
arrest and 3 months in jail.)
Mr. Birkenfeld's unprecedented voluntary disclosures led directly to the agreement between the United States and UBS for payment of $780 million in fines and penalties. His disclosures led to the creation of an IRS amnesty program under which 14,700 people have come forward and admitted to illegal secret accounts. The IRS has recovered bilions of dollars from this program. Mr. Birkenfeld's whistleblower contributions also led to the termination of the illegal UBS program that existed to solicit and encourage wealthy Americans to hide their money in secret offshore accounts, and the creation of a new international tax treaty between the U.S. and Switzerland. UBS had illegally sheltered approximately $20 billion in assets through its clients' accounts until Mr. Birkenfeld contactead the U.S. government.
Without whistleblowers like Mr. Birkenfeld these crimes would continue with little chance of ever being discovered. The Department of Justice stated that the U.S. Government probably would have never learned of the $20 billion dollar tax fraud conspiracy, but for Mr. Birkenfeld's whistleblowing. On the other hand, continuing to punish Mr. Birkenfeld is having a chilling effect on would-be financial whistleblowers. I know. I represent some of them.