U.S. citizens must report all income to the United States, even if that income is kept in accounts outside of the country. Anyone who has an offshore account is required to file an annual Foreign Bank Account Report (FBAR) to alert the treasury department to the fact that the account exists at a foreign bank.  If income is earned on offshore investments, taxes must be paid on it. 

Authorities are already convinced of the need to aggressively go after investors who may be hiding money offshore in order to avoid full compliance with tax obligations.  Estimates indicate that around $7.6 trillion in wealth is held in offshore accounts, depriving governments worldwide of around $200 billion in unpaid income tax revenue. 

UBS Bank has been hit hard by federal investigators in recent years. In 2009, the offshore bank settled claims of helping clients to evade IRS tax obligations, paying a penalty of $780 million.  The bank is now being investigated again, this time for allegedly marketing illegal investments to U.S. investors who wanted to hide the income they were earning from the Internal Revenue Service. 

If you have not filed your FBARs (Report of Foreign bank and Financial Accounts) and IRS Form 8938 for all of your offshore accounts each year, you could face criminal and civil penalties if the IRS finds out. The IRS is cracking down on banks, and financial institutions are turning over accountholder names, so there is a good chance you will be identified if you haven’t disclosed offshore investments. 

In 2008, the United States took legal action to require Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to turn over information on U.S. citizens who were keeping money in offshore Swiss accounts in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.