IRS Promotes the Success of OVDI and Related Items (9/16/11)

As suspected, the IRS is promoting the success of the most recent offshore initiative -- OVDI 2011.  I will use this blog to post items in that general category, but encourage readers to post as comments any additional items -- pro and con -- that they think will be useful to readers.

The IRS promo piece is IRS Shows Continued Progress on International Tax Evasion, IR-2011-94 (9/15/11), here.  In the piece, the Commissioner claims major progress in global tax enforcement and getting back into the system.

My Editorial:  On the point of getting people back into the system, the truth is that the one size fits all approach kept many people out of the system and made many taxpayers cynical that good guys were being treated the same as bad guys.  Hopefully those taxpayers will get right in the system on a go-forward basis without serious repercussions from the past.  The truth is that most of those taxpayers who let by-gones be by-gones probably will never be bothered by the IRS and that could make those conscientious / fearful taxpayers who got into the program look and feel like dupes.  I think the system would have been better off with a more nuanced program.  A more nuanced program would have required more systemic resources but the additional cost would, I think, have been justified by treating bad actors worse than good actors.  (That's a relative scale, a continuum if you will, but I think the system would be better off with more nuance than the programs allowed.)  Just my thought, and really not trying to open up comments about the horrors of the system.  There are plenty of other posts where those comments are developed.

Of Fear and Hostages: A Mid-Sight Editorial on The OVDI Program and Extortion (8/1/11)

I write tonight an editorial comment on the OVDI program (and the OVDP program as well). Hindsight, they say, is always better than foresight. When the IRS designed these programs, the IRS did not have the benefit of hindsight. Nor, of course, do I have the benefit of hindsight. I must address the program mid-sight, which is where we are.

My mid-sight view of the OVDI (and its predecessor OVDP) is that it has some very rough edges -- some basic unfairness issues that the IRS should move affirmatively to address and resolve. I doubt that the IRS will listen to me, but I offer my views anyway and hope that the IRS or Congress will listen -- not because this is my issue but because the concerns I address are the concerns of many people who are hurting because of the way the IRS is administering the program and because of fears as to the way the IRS will administer the program.
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