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. 

Investors who have money in offshore accounts need to be aware that the Internal Revenue Service is looking to make examples out of those who do not declare their accounts. Just recently, a new indictment was announced against a U.S.-citizen/Kentucky resident with money that was kept in undeclared offshore accounts. This investor who has been indicted faces up to five years of incarceration if he is convicted of the charges he faces. 

According to Trib Live “more than half the world’s money passes almost undetected through a series of financial black holes that shelter it from not only the tax collector but form shareholders, partners and wives.”