Last week’s order in Bedrosian v US concerns an evidentiary dispute in an FBAR case. Bedrosian is CEO of pharmaceutical company Lannett. The dispute centered around the government’s motion in limine to exclude any evidence pertaining to its administrative determination to impose penalties for willfully failing to file an annual FBAR form. The government filed its motion, arguing that the evidence pertaining to its the administrative determination was irrelevant in the court proceeding, as the court would be making a de novo review on the merits of the penalty. The court agreed with the government.
I will describe the order and give some context.
read more...FBAR penalties are steep, especially if the failure to file the report is willful. A willful failure to file carries a penalty of up to the greater of $100,000 or 50% of the account balance.
In Bedrosian, the penalty at issue is about $1 million for willfully failing to disclose an interest in one of two UBS Swiss bank accounts.
Bedrosian had a Swiss account for many years, which he failed to disclose to the IRS. For many years he also did not report the income from the account on his federal income tax returns. He had another more recently opened smaller UBS account, which he began disclosing on an FBAR in the 2007 tax year, though when he filed the FBAR for that smaller account he did not report its income on his 2007 federal tax return.
The account he disclosed had a value of about $230,000; the other undisclosed account was worth about ten times that. In 2008 UBS told Bedrosian that it would be turning over all account information to the IRS. In 2010, Bedrosian amended the earlier FBAR filing and filed a new FBAR showing his interest in both accounts. He also amended his income tax return to reflect the income from the accounts.
The order from earlier this year on the cross summary judgment motions discusses how Bedrosian cooperated with IRS after it began investigating him in 2011. (See Jack Townsend’s Federal Tax Crimes blog post for an excellent discussion of the earlier order and the court’s discussion of the willfulness standard; hard working Jack also beat us to this punch with a post yesterday on last week’s order here). Initially the IRS proposed to only impose nonwillful FBAR penalties; however, for reasons that are not clear the IRS reassigned the matter to another IRS agent, and that agent recommended imposing the willful FBAR penalty. IRS went ahead and proposed to impose the largest willful penalty allowed under the regs; that was just under $1M.
Bedrosian sued claiming that the penalty amounted to an illegal exaction, leading both parties to file summary judgment motions.
After denying both parties’ summary judgment motions, and with the case heading to trial, the government sought to exclude from trial the evidence pertaining to the IRS’s flip flop on its penalty determination. Last week’s order agreed with the government. In so doing the court looked to analogous case law that provides that the “thoughts and analysis, application of facts to law at the administrative level with respect to willfulness have no place in the Court’s de novo review of whether Bedrosian willfully failed to comply with the FBAR requirements.”
Bedrosian cited case law interpreting the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which also has de novo review of administrative proceedings but has mandated that the earlier proceedings become part of the record in court challenges. The Bedrosian order distinguished that line of cases, as the IDEA statute specifically requires that the courts should receive records of the earlier administrative proceedings.
The key, from the court’s perspective, was that the government’s documents on its FBAR penalty determination were not relevant to its task of making an independent determination on whether Bedrosian acted willfully in failing to file the FBAR. The matter now proceeds to a trial on the merits. As there are many FBAR cases in the pipeline, and only a handful of court opinions and orders, this is an important victory for the government.
About Leslie Book
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