TaxMan123.com

By Roger Chartier

United States of America IRS Tax Information

TAX BLOG
When Roger has some spare time, he posts here. Good articles!

LINK TO BLOG HOME PAGE

Bradley Birkenfeld got $104 Million from the IRS

On February 26, 1965 Bradley Birkenfeld was born and into a financially fit family.

He went to Norwich University in Vermont and later to the American Graduate School of Business in Switzerland.

He worked for Credit Suisse

Starting in 1996 then onto Barclay's bank in 1998 and then again moved to UBS in 2001. He was then a private banker who worked to get Americans with money to invest in the bank on the sneak so as to avoid paying taxes.

As if he didn't know it was wrong all along, he continued in this work for quite a while.

He and American real estate magnate Igor Olenicoff put together a deal where Olenicoff put $200 million into UBS, and the money was accessible through credit cards created by Birkenfeld.

That was just one of the stories behind his business games.

October 2005 brought Birkenfeld's resignation from UBS because of the "supposed illegalities they were involved in".

The US Department of Justice investigated UBS and the result was that they got busted big time and had to pay out $780 million to shut up the case with the US government. They handed over the US the names of 4,500 American depositors.

Birkenfeld decided in 2007 to talk to the USA DOJ about what he knew that UBS was involved in (they would have caught him in the end anyway) as a snitch for money.

Birkenfeld ended up getting sentenced with 40 months in prison. He was going to get out at the end of November 2012 from all of this.

In the end, he got out early in August of 2012.

What can we say?

Now he has $104 million dollars and can spend it anyway he wants.

I wonder if he would put it into an offshore bank account.