The United States seems to be tightening the nook around tax evaders and going after tax havens. This was evident in the case of three Swiss banks being forced to pay a total of more than US$130 million (approx. AU$183 million) to the US Justice Department to avoid prosecution for the allegedly helping some Americans to evade taxes.

One of the Swiss banks is a unit of France's Crédit Agricole. The Zurich-based unit of Crédit Agricole will have to pay US $99.2 million (approx. AU$138 million) while Dreyfus Sons & Co Ltd has $24.2 million (approx. AU$ 34 million) in fine and Banquiers will pay US$7.7 million (approx. AU$10 million). The last two are based in Basel, Switzerland, reports Reuters. However, the Swiss banks did not react.

Voluntary disclosure

The banks are offered an escape net from legal action under a voluntary program of the Justice Department launched in 2013. Under this, Swiss banks can resolve potential criminal charges by disclosing cross-border activities on concealed assets of US bank account holders. The program seeks detailed information from the Swiss banks on the accounts maintained by US taxpayers that are under investigation.

Among the banks, Crédit Agricole handled 954 US-related accounts worth more than US$1.8 billion (approx. AU$2.5 billion) since August 2008, the Justice Department said. It said the banks were noticed for conduct that included transferring assets of some US-related accounts “in ways that concealed the U.S. connection to those accounts.”

The Justice Department also took a serious note of the practices of some banks in setting up overseas entities in places like Panama for holding client funds to conceal owners' true identities from US tax authorities.

Dormant accounts

Meanwhile, the Swiss Bankers Association posted information online with details such as names, nationalities and last-known residences of 2,600 owners of safe-deposit boxes and accounts that remained untouched for more than 60 years. For Swiss banks, dormant accounts have been a thorny issue for long. The list includes many nationalities, such as Iranians and Tunisians besides Europeans and Americans.

Swiss banks had been grappling with the problem of dormant assets for many years and were keeping them within their books without breaching laws of bank-secrecy. However, the information released on Wednesday marked a shift in Swiss regulations that came into effect in early 2015, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Swiss bank lobby, Swiss Bankers Association, also praised the new regulations for ensuring “legal certainty to bankers” for rightful owners of inactive accounts. The office of the Swiss Banking Ombudsman was created in the 1990s, to mediate the claims on dormant assets.

In 1999, the assets left behind by Holocaust victims led to a settlement between Swiss banks such as UBS Group AG and Credit Suisse Group AG in a US $1.25 billion (approx. AU$1.6 billion) and the groups, which sought restitution of all dormant accounts.

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