Today we welcome first time guest bloggers Peter D. Hardy and Carolyn H. Kendall who practice in the Internal Investigations & White Collar Defense Practice Group of the law firm of Post & Schell P.C., in Philadelphia, PA. Peter, a principal in the firm, is the author of a legal treatise entitled Criminal Tax, Money Laundering, and Bank Secrecy Act Litigation (Bloomberg BNA 2010). He also serves as an adjunct law professor for the Villanova University School of Law Graduate Tax Program, where he co-teaches a class on civil and criminal tax penalties. Carolyn, an associate at the firm, co-authored the 2014 Supplement to Criminal Tax, Money Laundering, and Bank Secrecy Act Litigation. Both conduct internal investigations and defend corporations, officers and other individuals facing criminal and civil investigations.
They also assist clients in offshore account disclosure and compliance via IRS disclosure programs (OVDP and Streamlined Procedures) which is the subject of today’s blog post. Picking up on a recommendation in the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2014 Annual Report, they explain in a two part post the change they feel necessary to the willfulness standard applied to the reporting (or failure to report) offshore bank accounts. Today’s post describes the problem and early case law. Tomorrow’s post will explain where the standard veered off course and how to get it back on track with the appropriate legislative change. Keith
The government has pursued for several years a successful enforcement campaign against undisclosed offshore accounts; the definitive opening salvo in this campaign was the deferred prosecution agreement in February 2009 involving Swiss banking giant UBS. In addition to numerous prosecutions of account holders, professionals, and banks, the IRS has reported that over 38,000 U.S. taxpayers to date have self-disclosed their offshore accounts. The reporting form that has driven this enforcement campaign is the Foreign Bank Account Report, or FBAR, an annual report required under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) for U.S. taxpayers holding offshore accounts with a value above $10,000 at any point in the year. Underlying the success of the campaign and the number of voluntary disclosures has been the potentially draconian civil penalties associated with failing to file an FBAR: a “willful” failure to file an FBAR, or the “willful” filing of a false FBAR, can produce a civil penalty equal to fifty percent of the entire account balance, for every year of violation. Given a six year statute of limitations, stacked civil penalties could equate to three times the account balance. Thus, although a “willful” FBAR violation can result in criminal penalties, the tail of potentially very severe civil penalties often has wagged the dog of most taxpayers’ very unlikely real world criminal exposure, and has allowed the IRS to dictate some tough terms when outlining its offshore disclosure programs, which permit taxpayers to avoid criminal prosecution and avoid the harsh 50% penalty.
On January 14, 2015, the National Taxpayer Advocate issued a detailed report (“Report”) regarding suggested reforms of the civil FBAR penalty regime. Although the Report contains many good proposals, we focus here on just one, which seems to strike at the heart of the many critiques raised over the years regarding the perceived inequities in the structure and application of the IRS’s various offshore voluntary disclosure (OVD) programs. The OVD programs have netted many people who may have inadvertently failed to file FBARs, and who are not wealthy people with substantial accounts. As the Report explains, uncertainty has compelled some individuals who never committed fraud to resign themselves to significant civil penalties because“[b]enign actors cannot be sure that IRS will not view their FBAR violations as ‘willful,’ and attempt to impose severe penalties. This is because the government has eroded the distinction between willful and non-willful violations.”
read more...We agree. Court victories by the government in civil FBAR enforcement actions have diluted the willfulness threshold, from the more appropriate standard of an intentional and voluntary violation of a known legal duty, to a standard of mere recklessness. A “recklessness” standard lacks precision and invites severe penalties simply because an individual is presumed – or is concerned about being presumed – to have “known better,” even if he in fact did not know.
The Report therefore wisely proposes that the willfulness requirement for civil FBAR actions be amended legislatively to make clear that willfulness requires not just recklessness, but a voluntary and intentional violation of a known legal duty. In the first part of this two-part post, we describe how, prior to the current offshore enforcement campaign, willfulness in the civil FBAR context was understood to be equivalent to willfulness in the criminal context. In the second part, we describe how recent case law in the civil FBAR context has eroded this definition, and why the Report’s legislative proposal would benefit both taxpayers and the IRS by correcting this apparent trend. As practitioners who assist taxpayers with disclosing their offshore accounts and becoming fully tax compliant, we join with the Report and the public and private comments of many of our colleagues in observing that this erosion of the willfulness standard fails to distinguish adequately between most account holders and true bad actors, and therefore can discourage those who otherwise wish to become fully compliant.
Admittedly, the Report’s legislative proposal is unlikely to attract much Congressional support, given current budget deficits and the presumed desire of legislators to avoid being depicted as protecting offshore account holders. Nonetheless, the legal point remains: if an individual did not act with the intent to violate a known legal duty, then it is difficult to argue why he should be subject to a very draconian, albeit civil, penalty from the perspective of either fairness or the smart use of limited enforcement resources. As the Report states, the enhanced civil penalties for willful conduct were enacted to target bad actors, not to ensnare the inadvertent or negligent. Moreover, and aside from the benefits of attaining consistency between the civil and criminal penalty regimes for willful conduct, the practical reality is that the current IRS “streamlined” program for disclosing offshore accounts, which requires that the taxpayer submit a certificate attesting to his non-willfulness, is complicated by the possibility that the taxpayer is really being asked to assert that he did not act “recklessly,” which is a potentially much murkier claim than asserting that he did not act with fraudulent intent. Indeed, and as we explain, even the IRS used to state that willfulness for the substantial civil FBAR penalties demanded the same heightened showing required for criminal willfulness.
However, and as we note in our second post, we respectfully disagree with the Report that any legislative or policy change should prevent the government from meeting its burden through use of circumstantial evidence or the doctrine of willful blindness. Such proposals would contradict well-settled methods of showing mental state, and would be unworkable in practice.
United States v. Sturman and the IRS’s 2006 Chief Counsel Advisory Memo
If performed “willfully,” failing to file an FBAR, or filing a false FBAR, is a felony violation of the BSA under 31 U.S.C. §§5314 and 5322(a). A “willful” act, for the purposes of Section 5322 – and also for the vast majority of criminal tax offenses – means a voluntary and intentional violation of a known legal duty.
Prior to the government’s relatively recent offshore account enforcement campaign, the federal courts offered scant guidance as to what qualified as a “willful” failure to file an FBAR. In 1991, the Sixth Circuit upheld a criminal conviction for a willful failure to file an FBAR in United States v. Sturman. Defendant Sturman challenged on appeal his convictions for tax fraud and failing to file FBARs pertaining to business proceeds deposited into Swiss bank accounts. He argued in part that the government had failed to establish he was aware of the legal requirement to file FBARs. The Sturman court rejected this claim and upheld the convictions. In so doing, it cited Cheek v. United States, the seminal case regarding willfulness in the criminal tax context, for the propositions that the test for willfulness is a “voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal duty” and that willfulness “may be proven through inference from conduct meant to conceal or mislead sources of income or other financial information.” In upholding the convictions, the Sixth Circuit noted that the defendant had taken multiple steps to conceal his overseas assets from the government apart from his failure to file the FBAR, including concealing his signatory authority, interest in various transactions, and interest in the corporations that were transferring money to the foreign accounts. The Sturman court also noted that the defendant had admitted his “knowledge of and failure to answer” the question on Schedule B of his federal income tax return, which referred taxpayers to a booklet outlining the FBAR reporting requirements. The court found that the evidence of Sturman’s “acts to conceal income and financial information, combined with the defendant’s failure to pursue knowledge of further reporting requirements as suggested on Schedule B[,]”established willfulness.
The analysis in Sturman therefore reflects that an individual’s mere knowledge of and failure to answer correctly the question on Schedule B concerning foreign bank accounts, absent some other affirmative acts of concealment, is insufficient evidence to establish that the individual knew of the FBAR reporting requirement and willfully violated it – at least in a criminal case.
Once, the IRS itself took its cues from Sturman and embraced a more robust definition of willfulness in the civil FBAR context. In an IRS Chief Counsel Advisory Memorandum released on January 20, 2006, the IRS outlined its position on the willfulness requirement for imposing elevated civil penalties under 31 U.S.C. §5321(a)(5)(C) for an FBAR violation. The IRS stated in this 2006 memorandum that there were no cases “in which the issue presented is construing ‘willful’ in the civil penalty context[,]” a statement that was true at the time. The IRS then expressed its view that the willfulness requirement for imposing a Section 5321 civil penalty is identical to the willfulness requirement for criminal penalties under Section 5322 – i.e., a voluntary and intentional violation of a known legal duty – because both sections use the same word: “willful.” The IRS further noted in the 2006 memorandum that willfulness can be inferred where an “entire course of conduct establishes the necessary intent,” and as an example in the context of a criminal FBAR violation cited to Sturman. This reference to Sturman was potentially instructive because, as noted, the defendant’s criminal conviction for failing to file an FBAR in that case rested on additional affirmative acts of concealment beyond merely failing to check the correct box on Schedule B of his income tax return.
In our second and final post, we will discuss how some recent court rulings have relaxed this standard of willfulness in the civil FBAR context, so as to allow for mere recklessness, and how a legislative fix regarding the definition of willfulness would help to inject needed clarity into the “streamlined” program for offshore accounts, and restore overall fairness.
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