This IRS Amnesty Program originally terminated on September 23, 2009. IRS recently extended that deadline to Oct 15, 2009.
Now that you may still have time to meet the deadline -- here is a recent article that may help many Americans better understand this IRS Program:
Americans With Foreign Bank Deposits And Unreported Income – A Stay Out Of Jail Card From The I.R.S.
by Richard S. Lehman, P.A.
The most recent headlines include a controversy between the United Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss government versus the Internal Revenue Service of the United States. The U.S. is seeking the names of approximately 50,000 Americans with offshore bank accounts at U.B.S.
The headlines are a result of very strong efforts by the United States in recent years to stop the use of “tax havens” where Americans were depositing unreported income that had not been taxed and were doing so with anonymity and impurity.
Those efforts have started to bear fruit for the U.S. tax collectors. Since knowingly not reporting income on your Federal income tax return is a crime, many U.S. individuals were put in a hard place with important choices to make about taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service has very intelligently made that choice easier.
Read full article: http://www.lehmantaxlaw.com/amnesty_IRS.html
This author has found on many occasions that it is extremely helpful to request that counsel meet directly with the I.R.S. criminal investigator, without discussing the taxpayer’s name, for advice on dealing with gray areas of the law.
