Criminal Penalties for Failure to Report Foreign Bank Accounts

You may have seen in the news recently that one of the charges that Paul Manafort pled guilty to was failure to file foreign bank account reports. In today’s global economy, it is increasingly common that individuals who are obligated to file U.S. tax returns also have foreign bank accounts, which must be reported to the IRS. This includes U.S. citizens living abroad and foreign citizens residing in the U.S. with foreign bank accounts. Criminal and civil penalties can be levied solely for failure to file a form that discloses the existence of money on which an individual may not even owe U.S. taxes.

Read: Criminal Penalties for Failure to Report Foreign Bank Accounts

U.S. Dept. of Justice to Re-Prioritize White Collar Prosecutions

As Matt Taibbi noted in his New York Times Bestseller, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014), oddly, not a single high level individual Wall Street employee was ever prosecuted and jailed for the large-scale corporate malfeasance that led to the real estate and market implosions of 2008.

Read: U.S. Dept. of Justice to Re-Prioritize White Collar Prosecutions