As reported in today's NY Times, the October 15th deadline is looming for Americans who have used offshore accounts to conceal income from the IRS. The clock is ticking on relative leniency in penalties and possible criminal prosecution. All that pressure on UBS to cough up the names of tax cheats is bearing fruit; the wealthy are starting to panic.
As noted at the link, time is fast running out for many wealthy citizens who have been hiding millions in offshore accounts to evade income taxes. Under George W. Bush, the odds of being caught and brought to justice were.....sorry, I was laughing so hard I had to blow my nose. We all know the odds were zero, because no one was looking. The IRS was too busy harrassing waitresses and busboys about reporting tips to actually check on the überrich. But elections have consequences. Now the IRS is—finally!—going after the porcine plutocrats stashing their wealth overseas. You can almost hear the squealing if you listen carefully.
According to the Times, the rats are leaving this sinking ship.
With the deadline only days away, tax lawyers say they are being inundated by anxious clients.
"We’re seeing a flood of people," said Scott D. Michel, a tax lawyer in Washington. His firm, Caplin & Drysdale, has 350 clients who are preparing to report their offshore accounts to the Internal Revenue Service. The firm has 14 lawyers handling their cases, one of which involves a tax bill of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Hundreds of millions you say? Gosh, doesn't that make sense? For the IRS to go after, you know, cheating rich people rather than waitresses?
My favorite quote is from an unnamed doctor.
The client — a Florida surgeon, who spoke on the condition he not be named, given his tax troubles — said his accountant never told him he had to disclose the assets to the I.R.S.
"I really was convinced that the money was sitting somewhere legally and wasn’t taxable," the doctor said. But after reading about the crackdown, he entered the I.R.S. disclosure program in July.
(As a doctor, I feel the need to state that, honestly folks, we're not all so friggin' stupid in the medical profession.)
Gosh, my heart just bleeds for these people. "Unfairly" forced to reveal how much swag they really have stashed in Switzerland or the Caymans; compelled to actually pay taxes on those millions of bonus bucks; dammit, they'll have to pay taxes...just like their maid or groundskeeper.
What is this world coming too?