Senator Grassley Stands Up For Whistleblower
U.S. government “doing next to nothing” to stop tax evasion
Washington, D.C. June 8, 2010. Senator Chuck Grassley has expressed his outrage at the U.S. government’s handling of information provided by UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld. He sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of the Treasury demanding that the IRS provide him with a “detailed listing of all steps IRS has taken with the information Mr. Birkenfeld provided.”
Senator Grassley expressed his concern that the IRS “is doing next to nothing to identify tax evasion by U.S. taxpayers,” and pointed out that the information Bradley Birkenfeld provided “would allow the IRS to trace individuals in the U.S. that had UBS bank accounts.”
Lindsey M. Williams, Advocacy Director at the National Whistleblowers Center, said:
“We completely agree with Senator Grassley that U.S. taxpayers deserve to know what’s happened with the valuable information Bradley Birkenfeld brought forward, and insist that the U.S. government act by conducting a full criminal investigation of UBS USA. We hope three years after the Department of Justice dropped the ball on this investigation, that the Treasury Department and the IRS will finally finish what Mr. Birkenfeld started, and hold tax criminals accountable for their actions.”
Senator Grassley’s letter comes in the wake of a vote by the Swiss parliament that rejected a deal between the Department of Justice and UBS, in which UBS had agreed to turn over the names of 4,450 U.S. citizens who held secret and illegal bank accounts at UBS.
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