The Internal Revenue Service said it started a total of 4,121 criminal investigations in 2009, compared with 3,749 a year earlier.
The rise comes amid a busy time for U.S. tax prosecutors. Last year, Swiss bank UBS AG agreed to pay $780 million and hand over information for about 4,500 accounts to settle civil and criminal charges against it.
The agency reported a 13 percent rise in the number of probes the government calls "legal source" crimes. This is income from a legal business in which the income was masked or otherwise hidden. Convictions were up slightly for these crimes.
There was also a 13 percent jump among what the government calls illegal-source financial crimes, those funds from sources such as gambling or gun-running, excluding narcotics.
There was a slight drop in initiation of narcotics-related crimes.
The IRS ran a voluntary amnesty program that ended last year that yielded about 15,000 new taxpayers coming clean with the government.
Authorities say they are culling this information to potentially go after other individuals and other financial institutions that may have been helping Americans evade taxes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment