WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some 7,500 wealthy Americans turned over information about hidden overseas assets, including some valued at more than $100 million, ahead of a tax amnesty program's Thursday deadline, the top U.S. tax collector said. 

Doug Shulman, commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, said his agency would expand its crackdown on offshore tax evasion and will open new criminal investigation offices in Beijing, Panama and Sydney, Australia. The amnesty plan revealed accounts in 70 countries.

The pending 40 month prison sentence for one of the most important U.S. whistle-blowers ever has been roundly criticized as unfair. Critics say not only does Bradley Birkenfeld deserve reward for making the tax-evasion case against UBS, his former employer, but his harsh treatment is a bad example for those who want to expose fraud.

 

 

MIAMI, Oct 9 (Reuters) - The key informant in the U.S. tax evasion case against Swiss bank UBS AG faces prison next year, but his harsher-than-expected treatment by the U.S. Justice Department will undermine efforts to expose secretive offshore tax havens, lawyers and whistle-blower advocates say.

No one, including himself, would argue that Bradley Birkenfeld, 44, is a saint. The former UBS private-banking executive hasn't hidden the fact that he once bought diamonds with illicit money in Europe and then spirited them to California stuffed in a toothpaste tube, all part of an effort to conceal $200 million in assets on which his client - the Russia-born, California-based real estate mogul Igor Olenicoff - owed $7.2 million in U.S. taxes. But at the same time, almost no one in the U.S. government would deny that Birkenfeld was absolutely essential to its landmark tax-evasion case against Swiss banking giant UBS. The former UBS employee turned whistle-blower exposed the previously hidden world of offshore tax shelters, which cheats the Treasury out of about $100 billion a year. Thanks to his insider information, UBS was fined $780 million, and it promised to "exit entirely" from the U.S. tax-shelter business and to provide the names of thousands of American tax dodgers, from which hundreds of millions of dollars still might be collected. It also led to new tax treaties with the Swiss that should provide unprecedented tax information in civil cases and better access to such data in criminal cases. 

Associated Press October 1, 2009. Dangle some cash and a lot of people are happy to turn in their employers for cheating on their taxes.

Since Congress beefed up whistleblower rewards in late 2006, tips about suspected tax cheats owing at least $2 million have jumped more than tenfold, the Internal Revenue Service said in a report Thursday.

In 2008, the agency received tips on 1,246 suspected tax dodgers, each owing more than $2 million. That's up from 116 big-money tips in 2007.

By Bill Berkrot

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Taking on corporate giants can feel like tilting at windmills, but John Kopchinski's six-year legal battle against Pfizer Inc just made him a rich man.

The Gulf War veteran and former Pfizer sales representative will earn more than $51.5 million as a result of his whistleblower lawsuit against the world's biggest drugmaker and the record penalty the company must pay the U.S. government for its massive marketing transgressions.

ABA Journal, Sep 2, 2009 By Martha Neil

Five whistleblowers will share $102 million as part of a record-breaking $2.3 billion settlement by Pfizer Inc. of a federal criminal probe and civil qui tam litigation over the company's drug-marketing practices.

By David S. Hilzenrath, Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, August 20, 2009

In March 2006, an American employee of UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, sent a confidential letter to a top executive.

"I wish to invoke my rights listed under the UBS Whistleblowing Protection for Employees" policy, he wrote.

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--A key government informant in the U.S. tax investigation of UBS AG's (UBS) cross-border banking business was sentenced Friday to 3 years and 4 months in prison for helping the Swiss bank's American clients cheat on their taxes.

By CURT ANDERSON,The Associated Press Friday, August 21, 2009 3:06 

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- A former banker described by prosecutors as the man most responsible for sparking a broad U.S. investigation into rich Americans' use of secret Swiss bank accounts to evade taxes was sentenced Friday to more than three years in federal prison.