Hey You Wealthy Farmers Out There! No More Secret Swiss Bank Accounts To Hide Your Money!

Over in Switzerland, lawmakers are wrestling with how to end a tax dispute between UBS, the country’s biggest bank, and Washington, over those secret Swiss bank accounts where wealthy would-be tax dodgers hide their money .

Switzerland’s neighbours have been complaining for years about the Swiss approach, mindful of the tax receipts they were losing.

But it took pressure from the United States government and the threat of criminal prosecution just over a year ago to convince the Swiss it was time to change.

According to the Inland Revenue Service, the big Swiss bank used coded language in internal e-mails and memos, cooked up hundreds of sham offshore entities and lied to U.S. officials in order to hide the overseas accounts of wealthy Yanks, worth at least US $14.8 billion.

The mind boggles!

Allegedly, UBS held training sessions so that “client advisors” could secretly travel to the US to visit their customers and stay under the radar of tax agent or law enforcement officials. They were told to say they were visiting for “pleasure” not “business”. They even had phoney business presentations hooked up on their laptops in case they were border searched.

It all goes back to August 2009. UBS agreed to give up the names and accounts of about 4500 wealthy Americans suspected of evading taxes and pay a US $780 million fine – or face United States legal action.

Switzerland has gone one step further, signing at least 18 treaties with its most important partners, promising to dish the dirt on information exchanges on tax evasion and fraud.

Despite the shakedown, UBS remains among the world’s largest asset managers, with more than $2.3 trillion under management.

-          Genevieve Westcott, Host, “Money Talks”