"It soon won't be possible to hold unreported accounts"

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Israel Tax Authority deputy head of investigations Ronny Hacham said Israelis would have nowhere to hide.

Throughout the world, the walls have recently been closing in on anyone trying to conceal money from the tax authorities. The Israel Tax Authority likes to remind potential Israeli tax violators of this, and encouraged them to disclose all their property and money to the Tax Authority in the recent voluntary disclosure program before they are caught by the authorities.

This time, it was the turn of Tax Authority deputy head of investigations and intelligence division Ronny Hacham to mention that anyone who had not yet entered the program had nowhere to hide. "One year from now, it will be almost impossible to keep an overseas bank account," Hacham told a panel today on the voluntary disclosure proceeding held at an Israel Bar Association conference in Eilat. He added, "The world has changed, and the Tax Authority is getting more and more information revealing the Israelis who are trying to conceal their property and money from the state."

Hacham went on to say that the Tax Authority was not automatically approving a request for voluntary disclosure. "Of course, there won't be any argument that requests from old ladies with money from before WWII should be accepted, but don't expect me to approve voluntary disclosure by a criminal who sent his profits overseas and waited 10 years. You'll ask me to locate them and tell them no," he said. According to Hacham, the Tax Authority was adopting a liberal approach in approving the requests submitted to it.

Tax Authority head Moshe Asher commented in his speech at the Bar Association conference on the voluntary disclosure program announced by the Tax Authority six months ago, in which taxpayers disclose their assets on their own initiative. He said that over 1,700 such requests had been received to date, compared with 1,300 in the previous procedure.

According to Asher, the Tax Authority expects 3,000 requests amounting to billions of shekels by September.

Thousands of records

The Tax Authority is currently conducting a complex and widespread investigation in the Tax Assessment Offices for Haifa and the North of the affair of the Israeli foreign accounts. Last year, the Tax Authority obtained a list of accounts of Israeli clients of UBS suspected of using the bank in tax evasion, and later obtained another such list for the same bank. The accounts were held by Israelis mainly in Swiss banks, and amounted to hundreds of millions of euros. In a "Globes" interview last February, Asher said, "Today, we have thousands of Israelis' overseas bank records," and promised, "We'll reach all owners of unreported overseas accounts."

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 21, 2015

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2015

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