Thursday, June 16, 2011

Quiet Disclosures Being Moved into OVDI 2011 Process? (6/16/11)

There is some buzz in the community that persons making quiet disclosures are being moved into the OVDI 2011 process. While the information I have received to date is only sporadic and anecdotal, I thought it would be helpful to review the statute of quiet disclosures for foreign financial account tax and FBAR noncompliance.

I assume that readers of this blog are very familiar with the two successive programs -- OVDP 2009 and OVDI 2011. Many taxpayers who wanted to get into compliance felt that the civil penalties offered under these programs were too harsh under their facts. As I and commenters discuss in Opting Out of the IRS 2009 OVDP and 2011 OVDI (6/14/11), taxpayers could get into the program, achieve its principal benefit of no prosecution, and opt out to try to present the equities of their situation as a basis for achieving lesser penalties than offered under the programs. The fear among practitioners and taxpayers is that the IRS will harshly treat the taxpayers opting out. Certainly, for administrative purposes, the IRS wants to create significant risks to opting out in order to encourage the critical mass of taxpayers to stay in the program where the processing costs per taxpayer are significantly less than will be obtained in processing the audits and post-audit processes (including appeals and litigation) of taxpayers opting out.
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