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.

A 77-year-old CEO of an international pulp mill company faces up to five years of incarceration for failing to report offshore accounts. The CEO, George Landegger, was chairman of Parsons & Whittemore. From the early 2000’s through 2010, he kept money in offshore Swiss bank accounts. Despite the legal requirements that U.S. citizens file an annual Report of Foreign Bank Accounts (FBAR) declaring offshore investments, Landegger kept his Swiss accounts secret.  

Bank Leumi is an Israeli-based international bank with subsidiaries in seven countries, including Switzerland. Bank Leumi was under investigation by the Department of Justice and has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement that was recently filed in a California court. The deferred prosecution deal arose after Bank Leumi was accused of a decade-long effort to help U.S. citizens evade tax obligations. It is the first deal of its kind to be entered into by an Israeli bank. 

If you are a signatory on an offshore or foreign bank account but you do not earn income from that account, you likely do not think about it very often. Many family members have joint accounts with multiple signatories and non-beneficiary owners often have no actual transactions with the account over the course of the year.