Fess Up or Stay Quiet?

UBS agreed to release the identities of thousands of clients to the U.S. Above, its New York offices.




One post to the discussion site for this article captures my opinion as strongly as I feel it: “I am sick of people who willfully try to duck their tax responsibilities. They believe it's okay so long as they don't get caught and that's just plain wrong."

Some people do not make a distinction between right and wrong, but between selfishness and gullibility: if I can get away with it, and it's in my favor, then it's fine. Except it isn't.


The Internal Revenue Service is staging a massive poker game. It has invited 52,000 UBS AG account holders to the table.

Now that the U.S. and Swiss governments have resolved a longstanding dispute about disclosing the identities of secret Swiss bank accounts, the holders face an acute dilemma: Do they confess their tax-evasion sins and possibly give up a large portion of their offshore accounts? Or do they stay quiet, hoping to avoid detection, but risk far greater penalties or even criminal prosecution if exposed to authorities?

Their decision is made harder because the IRS is doing its best to keep account holders in the dark about both the timing and reasons for which names are disclosed. That is because the IRS hopes to use the threat of disclosure as leverage, coaxing offshore tax evaders to come clean on their own.

While holders of secretive Swiss accounts are reluctant to talk to the media, their lawyers say many are still undecided. One factor in play: The IRS only has resources to prosecute about 1,000 criminal tax cases each year. "I'm surprised at how many are willing to gamble," said Kevin Packman of Holland & Knight in Miami.

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Rapper takes on Right

Seb Agnetti/Universal Music Switzerland - “I just felt there had to be some reaction,” the rapper Stress said of his political songs.







Switzerland’s leading rapper, Stress, has come out with a new album, “Kings, Pawns and Bishops.” After provoking a minor scandal a few years ago with a song whose title had an expletive before the name of Christoph Blocher, the leader of the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party, the country’s most popular party, Stress dishes out some more of the same this time.

In person a cordial 30-year-old immigrant from Estonia (born Andres Andrekson), Stress was raised by his mother in Lausanne and is married to a former Miss Switzerland. After college, he worked at Procter & Gamble on the Swiss Mr. Clean account. His last album went double platinum here, which for a nation of 7.6 million, culturally split among German, French and Italian speakers, meant sales topped 85,000.

Christoph Blocher with “The Woodcutter” by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, at his office in Bern, Switzerland, in 2006.





Mr. Blocher, a chemicals tycoon, himself descended from Swabian immigrants from Germany (not that he makes a point of it), was until the end of 2007 the country’s justice minister. Now 68, he rose to political power as leader of the Swiss People’s Party: demonizing immigrants (in a country whose population is 20 percent foreigners, mostly Western Europeans), bashing the European Union, trumpeting privatization, lowering taxes and advocating traditional values.

Ah, yes, traditional values. Know them well; Republicans in the US trumpet them.

The program resonated with big money and rural voters. The Swiss People’s Party won 29 percent in the last election, the highest percentage of any party, and about as high as any far-right party in Western Europe has won.

Big money and rural: the ones who have and don't want others to have, and the xenophobic.

“We call it the Americanization of Swiss politics,” explained Pascal Sciarini, who runs the political science department at the University of Geneva. “Crime has remained the same in recent years, but Blocher and his allies cultivate a sense of insecurity by running a permanent political campaign, particularly against immigrants, and this resonates with Swiss people who fear change and find comfort in traditional 19th-century values.”

How apt: Americanization. Done that way here: cultivate insecurity, attack immigrants, rant and rave that "they" are disrupting traditional family values, harken back to the age of Reagan, and base the law on how it was supposed to have been 200 years ago.

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