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On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that Credit Suisse, the second largest bank in Switzerland, has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges for helping Americans open secret bank accounts and use them to evade U.S. taxes. The bank will pay $1.9 billion to the federal government and $715 million to the state of New York in restitution and fines.
Surprisingly, the agreement does not require the bank to hand over the names of its U.S. customers. In a statement issued the same day, Senator Carl Levin remarked “it is a mystery to me why the U.S. government didn’t require as part of the agreement that the bank cough up some of the names of the U.S. clients with secret Swiss bank accounts. More than 20,000 Americans were Credit Suisse accountholders in Switzerland, the vast majority of whom never disclosed their accounts as required by U.S. law. This leaves their identities undisclosed, with no accountability for taxes owed.”
This is in stark contrast to the 2008 deferred prosecution agreement with UBS, the largest Swiss bank. The financial giant agreed to pay $780 million in penalties and, unlike Credit Suisse, handed over 4,700 names of American account holders.
The Credit Suisse agreement comes after years of investigations into the bank’s illegal activities aiding tax evasion which were detailed in a February report by the Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report lambasted the American and Swiss governments for dragging their feet in efforts to stop it.
The report noted that Switzerland has bank secrecy laws that prevent banks from disclosing the identities of account holders to U.S. tax enforcement authorities. Switzerland enacted a law specifically allowing UBS to provide that information to the U.S. government, but no such law was enacted this time around for Credit Suisse. Instead, the Department of Justice relied on the convoluted process outlined in a U.S.-Swiss treaty to get the information. That process has given greater power to the Swiss government and Swiss courts that have provided as little cooperation as possible.
Although the agreement imposes big fines, it does not revoke Credit Suisse’s license to continue to operate in the U.S. Apparently some fear the repercussions of taking a harder line against the big banks, apprehensive that stronger actions might precipitate a financial crisis. The possibility that the Department of Justice wanted to avoid this and did not push as hard as it might (for example, by demanding the disclosure of account holders) may mean that some banks really are “too big to jail.”
Switzerland has long been known as a tax haven for individuals from all over the world who want to hide their income from tax authorities with the help of banks like UBS and Credit Suisse. It has also been known as a tax haven for corporations like Alliance Boots that want to artificially shift profits there to avoid paying taxes in the countries where their profits are really earned. One might think it would be easier to solve the problem of individuals using tax havens to evade taxes, since that is illegal, whereas the tax avoidance of big corporations like Alliance Boots is not actually illegal (but should be). But the laws against tax evasion by individuals using Credit Suisse and other banks to hide their income are only as strong as the will of governments to enforce them.