In an 11th hour amnesty opportunity, over 14,700 Americans reported hidden Swiss bank accounts to the IRS.
Bloomberg has more:
"We were flooded with people coming in during the final days of the program," Shulman told reporters on a conference call in Washington today as the U.S. and Swiss governments released a list of criteria used by Switzerland to screen American clients of UBS AG bank for tax fraud.
Americans with undeclared offshore accounts have been under growing pressure since Switzerland agreed Aug. 19 to hand over data to the U.S. on as many as 4,450 UBS accounts to settle a lawsuit in which the U.S. had sought as many as 52,000 accounts.
One of the silver linings under the cloud of TARP funds and bank bailouts is that the US Government has a new opportunity to seek greater transparency and accountability in the world financial system.
And while I'm angry about stories like the drastically inflated prices paid for toxic assets by the New York Fed, I'm also looking forward to a new era in financial regulatory reform.
On the right, Tea Partiers are being told to hate the government for its failures, even while the government seeks financial system regulatory reform.
Arianna Huffington has spoken out repeatedly on the left about the "free pass" given to Tim Geithner after his role in the New York Fed.
But I'm watching this whole thing with some guarded optimism.
Because the more we see stories about Bernie Madoff, Allan Stanford, and other corporate swindlers, the more the American people recognize that the free market catastrophe of the Bush era is an epic failure.
For all the talk of "government bureaucracies" and unethical behavior by government officials, there is something different about our public servants. They are public servants. And public servants should serve the public publicly.
In a sense, this is what a nation of laws should be doing. Tim Geithner should be allowed to focus on helping to balance our nation's budget, promote sustainable economic growth, and maximize opportunity in our nation's financial system.
And Neil Barofsky should be able to tear him another asshole when Geithner steps over the line into policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of us regular shmoes.
And the American people should recognize that there is something fundamentally unjust about a system that socializes the risk but privatizes the profits.
And we should have every right to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans - because we bailed their sorry butts out of their greedy self-immolation. They can buy a TV station and blame ACORN, but at the end of the day, it's corporate greed that created this systemic failure, and we need to put checks in place to ensure that it never happens again.