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Do You Know Your Options With Voluntary Disclosure 2012

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And the IRS demands to know where all the people foreign accounts are located --- it is a crime to keep these account secret if they are over $10,000.00 in value. The IRS offered two previous offshore voluntary disclosure initiatives. One in 2009 and the last one in 2011. The last one passed on August 31, 2011. For those people thinking what to do, this piece talks about their 4 remaining options.

Option One: Do nothing. You could do nothing and hope that the Internal Revenue Service does not find out the foreign bank account. Perhaps your account is at a bank that you believe to be "off the radar" or is in a quiet country, or under a friend's name, or opened with a non-US passport. Well, it used to be that a foreign bank account's true owner could be kept anonymous. However, now, the Internal Revenue Service has vastly many more weapon at its disposal than it ever did previously to find unreported accounts.

This is an fundamental disadvantage. The chances are that the IRS does not discover hidden accounts gets more and more remote. Why? Because in order to compete for US customer and capital, foreign banks are coerced into complying with the Internal Revenue Service. That's right --- foreign banks take their marking orders from the IRS as well. So if the IRS wants information on US holders of foreign accounts, the IRS will get that information. The IRS will also run names of other individuals it suspects of being US citizens but who opened their accounts with foreign passports. The IRS has incredible investigative powers --- powers it never had before.

The second option is to renounce citizenship and leave the country --- as this is the only way to escape the taxing jurisdiction of the IRS. But be warned --- expatriation only works to avoid future tax debts and submission issues. The lone technique to correctly relinquish is to essentially come forward about all foreign bank financial accounts and actually pay an expatriation excise (in many ways it was easier to leave Soviet Block country than to leave the USA completely intact with your wealth.)

Option 3: Soft (or quiet) disclosure. An option that some people attempted is to file amended tax forms 1040X's and mail them to the IRS just like "regular" 1040X's, pay the taxes, and hope the Internal Revenue Service won't figure out what was going on. Doesn't this seems think a fool-proof game-plan? Perhaps one could avoid all those excessive penalties of the OVDI programs?

The Department of Justice states that it has begun prosecutions on people who have attempted soft disclosures. So this option has some serious problems

The "soft" disclosure option is incredibly risky for several reasons. One massive failing is that a soft disclosure does not address the issue of the taxpayer's non-compliance in FBAR filing; failing to filing an FBAR can be a criminal charge just by itself. As a result simply filing a quiet disclosure does not go far enough to eliminate any possibility of criminal charges. In fact, the amended return may --- well here's the problem with this option --- the quiet disclosure does nothing concerning the failure to FBAR forms. There are still criminal and civil charges that may be pending for failing to file an FBAR, but simply give the IRS a roadmap to locate you.

Option 4: Pre-emptive Disclosure and Negotiation (" Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative") If enjoying the rest of your life is chief importance, there can be no doubt that this is the best option. Yes, the 2011 initiative expired, but that does not mean a voluntary disclosure can not be filed. The Internal Revenue Service always welcomes offshore disclosures. The only thing that expired was the particular provisions of the 2011 OVDI which capped certain penalties.

There are only two requirements. Initially, the taxpayer can not be under audit. In addition, the source of the funds in the foreign bank accounts can not be from an illegal source. Think drug trafficking or money laundering.

If someone is still questioning what the proper course of action is, it is imperative that they only talk to a qualified offshore tax law firm. The attorney-client privilege only applies in communications to an attorney. The Internal Revenue Service can subpoena a CPA or nearly anyone else to testify against a taxpayer.

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