Financial Transparency Coalition

US Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and US House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel today introduced legislation aimed at curtailing offshore tax evasion. From Reuters:

Under the proposed bill, foreign banks would be forced to disclose information about American customers, or face a 30 percent tax on their income from U.S. financial assets.

The legislation would crack down on shell companies by requiring a foreign corporation to give the U.S. Treasury the names of Americans who own more than 10 percent of its shares.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A proposal to stop rich Americans from stashing assets offshore to evade taxes, by slapping penalties on individuals and foreign financial institutions, was introduced on Tuesday in the U.S. Congress.

Senator Carl Levin was in bullish mood when he spoke last night at the annual conference of the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development here in Washington. "More progress has been made in the past year than in the previous decade", he said, "causing total upheaval in the offshore tax haven world." The recent deferred settlement agreed with Swiss private banking giant UBS was enormously significant, especially since the bank will now be required to advise the US authorities automatically each time when it opens an account for a US citizen. The scale of the backdown by...

Washington, DC – "We have the means to end offshore tax abuse if we have the political will to act," was the message delivered by Carl Levin in his keynote speech for given before dinner guests at the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development's conference, Increasing Transparency in Global Finance: A Development Imperative.