Financial Transparency Coalition

The Senate subcommittee on investigations held their hearing today to highlight the problem of US law and money laundering activities from foreign officials. They also released a report, which can be downloaded here. I wrote about the hearing yesterday, so I'd like to make a general comment about the report. Reading through each of the case studies, a theme emerges. At various points in each study, certain public and private individuals and institutions identified the unlawful or suspect nature of the financial transactions taking place in front of them. Often, they acted to close a bank account, notify authorities,...

Summary: Recent events have highlighted the growing use of foreign financial institutions, foreign trusts, and foreign corporations by U.S. individuals to evade U.S. tax. In order to prevent this tax evasion, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2009 would provide the U.S. Treasury Department with significant new tools to find and prosecute U.S. individuals that hide assets overseas from the Internal Revenue Service.

Washington, D.C. – Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D?Mont.), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D?NY), senior Senate Finance Committee member John Kerry (D?MA) and Ways and Means Select Revenue Subcommittee Chairman Richard Neal (D?MA) today unveiled a comprehensive proposal to clamp down on tax evasion and improve taxpayer compliance by giving the IRS new administrative tools to detect, deter and discourage offshore tax abuses.