Questing for Atlantis

Last month I celebrated the Swiss government telling the United States the IRS could kindly mind its own business after they made the statement that:

“Switzerland will use its legal authority to ensure that the bank cannot be pressured to transmit the information illegally, including if necessary by issuing an order taking effective control of the data at UBS”

Sadly,  I now have to withdraw that praise. Reuters is reporting that Switzerland has cut a deal with the United States to disclose approximately 4,450 UBS accounts to the IRS.

Even worse, the agreement lays out the system for disclosing even more confidential information to the IRS.

Under the agreement, the Swiss government has agreed to review and process more requests for “information from other banks regarding their account holders to the extent that such a request is based on a pattern of facts and circumstances equivalent to those of the UBS case,” the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service said.

As I noted in the last post on this subject, tax havens are a vital and important feature of the global economy. Let’s hope other tax havens have a bit more spine than the Swiss have demonstrated.

But at least the Swiss get something out of this. I’m giving them the Neville Chamberlain Award for Cowardice they’ve earned for appeasing U.S. imperialism and tax tyranny.