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GAO-14-265R 1 (2014-01-06)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaahnl0001 and id is 1 raw text is: GO U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Washington, DC 20548 January 6, 2014 The Honorable Carl Levin Chairman, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs United States Senate Subject: IRS's Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program: 2009 Participation by State and Location of Foreign Bank Accounts Dear Mr. Chairman: This letter transmits information you requested on participants in the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) 2009 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program (OVDP), which offered incentives for taxpayers to disclose their offshore accounts and pay delinquent taxes, interest and penalties. Generally, the program offered somewhat reduced penalties and no risk of criminal prosecution, if eligible taxpayers fully disclosed their previously unreported offshore accounts, and paid taxes due plus interest. Specifically, included is participation data by state and location of foreign bank accounts. This information supplements our March 2013 report.1 To provide this information, we used analyses from our March 2013 report that were based on six years of tax return data from all 2009 OVDP participants. For the purposes of this review, we determined the data used in our analyses to be reliable. Our data reliability assessment included reviewing relevant documentation, interviewing IRS officials knowledgeable about the data, and testing the data electronically to identify obvious errors or outliers. We conducted this performance audit from June 2011 to March 2013 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. 2009 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program Participants by State For our March 2013 report, we identified approximately 10,500 original 2008 tax returns filed by 2009 OVDP participants. We reviewed the state listed in the mailing address field of these returns. This mailing address may not necessarily reflect the state of residence of the taxpayers. As IRS notes when it publishes data on taxpayers by state, some taxpayers may have used the address of a tax lawyer, or accountant, or the address of a place of business; moreover, such addresses could each have been located in a state other than the state in which the taxpayer 1 GAO, Offshore Tax Evasion: IRS Has Collected Billions of Dollars, but May be Missing Continued Evasion, GAO- 13-318 (Washington, D.C.: Mar. 27, 2013). GAO-14-265R IRS's Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program Page 1

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