By Vincent Joyce, Patriot Ledger

Besides Swiss banks, the little European principalities of Monaco and Liechtenstein have long been known as tax havens.

Until this year, bank secrecy laws made it illegal for these banks to disclose holder account information. These secrecy laws made these countries (including the Cayman Islands) popular tax havens for wealthy Americans looking to conceal money earned from Uncle Sam. They certainly were not primarily for bank interest.

This coming year, the global implementation of FATCA (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) is adding to global pressure to ferret out unreported income accounts. The odds of getting caught are going up exponentially.

The IRS is now asking Liechtenstein Landesbanks for records going back to 2004. In addition, the IRS is now running an amnesty program for taxpayers with foreign bank accounts that also include foreign brokerage accounts. The penalties are steep but no jail time.

The IRS amnesty program and criminal prosecution protocols run largely on a first-contact basis. If the IRS finds you first all bets are off and as a result you are not an amnesty candidate.

The IRS recently gave a $104 million reward to a former Swiss bank UBS AG employee who gave the IRS information about overseas tax cheats. He exposed widespread tax evasion at the Swiss bank, which resulted in a $780 million fine against the bank and an unprecedented agreement requiring UBS to turn over thousands of names of suspected American tax dodgers to the IRS.

I received information from the Boston district of the IRS that they are now prosecuting the names given to them resulting in millions of tax dollars now being paid to the U.S. Treasury. These people not paying their tax obligations were denying our country millions in tax revenues.

Americans who are now holding bank accounts in tax haven countries are in for an IRS visit because it’s obvious there is more unreported income, same as was found in the Swiss bank accounts.

In all my years of voting, I don’t recall any presidential candidate having foreign bank accounts in tax haven countries. To be president, information about these accounts should be revealed to the American people with tax returns from previous years.

For more on this story go to: http://www.patriotledger.com/opinions/x383194424/VINCENT-JOYCE-Foreign-banks-and-presidential-candidates#ixzz289Et9CYZ