The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is planning to make offshore tax amnesty scheme less tough. The scheme was aimed at encouraging US citizens to declare any offshore bank accounts.
Speaking at a tax conference in Washington D.C, IRS commissioner John Koskinen acknowledged that his agency has been fixated on tax cheats, with too little regard for "non-willful" victims of its crackdown.
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Koskinen said the IRS is considering "whether our voluntary programs have been too focused on those wilfully evading their tax obligations and are not accommodating enough to others who don’t necessarily need protection from criminal prosecution because their compliance failures have been of the non-wilful variety".
"We are well aware that there are many U.S. citizens who have resided abroad for many years, perhaps even the vast majority of their lives," he said, promising more details of the amnesty program in "the very near future."
"Our goal is to ensure we have struck the right balance between emphasis on aggressive enforcement and focus on the law-abiding instincts of most U.S. citizens who, given the proper chance, will voluntarily come into compliance and willingly remedy past mistakes," he added.
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By GlobalData
