More than 14,700 taxpayers disclose offshore bank accounts

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More than 14,700 taxpayers have disclosed formerly secret offshore bank accounts, the Justice department and the Internal Revenue Service announced this morning. The disclosures, prompted by a partial amnesty connected to a settlement of civil and criminal cases against Swiss banking giant UBS AG, represent almost double the initial numbers the IRS announced in October and surpasses the number of voluntary disclosures received in 2008, the agencies said.

“We were flooded with people coming in during the final days of the program,” IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said this morning on a conference call in Washington.

“The Department of Justice is pleased with the extraordinary results achieved from this landmark settlement,” Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden said in a prepared statement. “The message to American taxpayers is clear: the era of bank secrecy and hidden assets is over.”

Switzerland in August agreed to hand over to the United States thousands of UBS accounts to settle a lawsuit in which the U.S. had sought as many as 52,000 accounts. Switzerland said it will turn over details of UBS accounts held by U.S. residents who had almost $1 million in undeclared assets.

-- Michael Muskal
Twitter.com/LATimesmuskal